Now it’s the moon’s turn to pull a disappearing act. After being shut out of this month’s total solar eclipse, the Americas will have the best seats in the celestial house when Earth’s shadow briefly envelops the moon. Almost the entire lunar surface will be masked Thursday night into Friday—a whopping 96%—making this an especially […]

An international team of astrophysicists and plasma physicists has provided the first experimental evidence that strong magnetic fields surrounding active stars can completely suppress coronal mass ejections. This offers clues to why massive stellar eruptions are rarely observed on stars other than the sun.

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Over the past three decades, computer models of planetary system formation have gone from fairly crude representations to sophisticated simulations using thousands of different starting points.

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We’ve known for nearly two decades that some form of water exists on the moon. What we still don’t know is exactly how much accessible water ice lies inside permanently shadowed craters, how deeply it is buried or what form it takes.

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A new study from Monash University has delivered the most complete and accurate digital map of Earth’s windblown sand dunes to date. The research, published in Nature Communications, answers long-standing questions about why dunes form where they do, unlocking key insights into climate conditions on Earth and other planets.

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Astronomers have discovered a chemically rich collection of sulfur-bearing molecules surrounding the rare massive star HD 87643. The observations include the first detection of sulfur monoxide and sulfur dioxide around a B[e] supergiant. The paper was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on July 1.

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The mission to save NASA’s sinking Swift Observatory was called off Wednesday, dooming the telescope to a fiery reentry later this year.

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A mysterious background of extremely low-frequency gravitational waves detected by networks of pulsars may carry information about events that began more than 13 billion years ago—including the formation of some of the first supermassive black holes in the universe.

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