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Explanation: What would it look like to fly past Triton, the largest moon of planet Neptune? Only one spacecraft has ever done this -- and the images of this dramatic encounter have been gathered into a video. In 1989, the Voyager 2 robotic spacecraft shot through the Neptune system with cameras blazing. Triton is slightly smaller than Earth's Moon but has ice volcanoes and a surface rich in frozen nitrogen. The first sequence in the video shows Voyager's approach to Triton, which, with the exception of an overall false green tint, appears in approximately true color. The mysterious cantaloupe terrain...

Explanation: Is this what will become of our Sun? Quite possibly. The first hint of our Sun's future was discovered inadvertently in 1764. At that time, Charles Messier was compiling a list of diffuse objects not to be confused with comets. The 27th object on Messier's list, now known as M27 or the Dumbbell Nebula, is a planetary nebula, one of the brightest planetary nebulas on the sky and visible with binoculars toward the constellation of the Fox (Vulpecula). It takes light about 1000 years to reach us from M27, featured here in colors enhanced by red for hydrogen and...

A massive exodus out of California is expected to happen after SpaceX’s historic and OpenAI’s confidential IPO, unleashing an unprecedented wave of tech millionaires to Florida. Following SpaceX’s IPO on June 12 that set the company’s valuation above $2 trillion and made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, around 4400 SpaceX employees also became millionaires. “The California area codes have already started showing up. It’s just that the conversations are evolving,” Fort Lauderdale Downtown Development Authority CEO and President Jenni Morejon said to Fox News. “The wealth doesn’t hide here… and I really think what we’re seeing now with AI...

Explanation: What if you could see the entire sky -- all at once -- for an entire year? That, very nearly, is what is pictured here. Every 15 seconds during 2025, an all-sky camera took an image of the sky over the Netherlands. Central columns from these images were then aligned and combined to create the featured keogram, with January at the top, December at the bottom, and the middle of the night running vertically just left of center. What do we see? Most obviously, the daytime sky is mostly blue, while the nighttime sky is mostly black. The twelve...

The famous atheist Richard Dawkins has confessed a rather unusual new faith, after becoming convinced that artificial intelligence (AI) is conscious. The biologist was converted to this new belief after just 72 hours of speaking with Claude, an AI chatbot created by Anthropic. Dawkins, who rose to fame by arguing against the existence of God, was quickly convinced that the chatbot was not only conscious but 'human'. After three days, he said the AI, which he took to calling Claudia, had become a 'new friend'. His experience even led the expert to question whether bots could be the 'next phase...

Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations have revealed the colorful secret of the Pink Planet, the coldest object of its type ever directly observed. A team of astronomers led by Northwestern University has revealed their findings in a recent paper published in The Astronomical Journal, finally describing the rose-colored haze covering the planetary-mass companion GJ504b, thanks to JWST data. For over a decade, researchers have speculated that atmospheric salt clouds may create the pink planet’s strange hue, but this is the first concrete evidence for the hypothesis. The Pink Planet Since its discovery in 2013,...

Explanation: Venus is now appearing on the celestial stage as Earth's brilliant evening star, performing with the Moon, other wandering planets, and bright stars in western skies. For evening sky gazers on June 17, the celestial beacon rose after sunset close by a young, slender, crescent Moon. But from some locations the Moon could be seen to occult or pass in front of Venus. And from a backyard observatory in southern British Columbia, Canada, the lunar occultation was played out in daylight. This stunning telescopic snapshot captured a scene in dramatically cloudy skies, following Venus' hour long disappearance, as the...

Via NBC, we're about to see a whole lot more of outer space than we've ever witnessed before: After nearly two decades of development, $4.3 billion and the labor of hundreds of scientists and engineers, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is less than three months from launch. From a point roughly 1 million miles from Earth, the telescope is expected to survey the cosmos, capturing panoramas of hundreds of millions of stars and billions of galaxies. With this observatory, NASA hopes to unravel the secrets of dark matter and dark energy and discover thousands of planets beyond our solar...

Explanation: Does this scene look familiar? It is a modern recreation of the famous painting Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. Both the image and the painting depict a tall tree on the left, a crescent moon on the upper right, the planet Venus just to the right of the tree, a foreground horizon rising from left to right, and clouds above the horizon. Differences include that the photograph was taken in mid-April earlier this year in Cascavel, Brazil, while the painting was composed in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, in 1889. The original Starry Night is considered by many to be one...

Explanation: Do you see that blue blob to the lower right of the image center? Astronomers think that it shows where a massive star exploded as a supernova whose light reached Earth 1,700 years ago. The image combines optical data from the PanSTARRS telescopes in Hawaii (background stars in red, green, and blue), radio from the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa (large red cloud) and X-rays from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton (shown in blue). The large cloud is a star forming region called Sagittarius C, which is approximately 50 light-years in extent and about 26,000 light-years from...

Explanation: How did a hamster wheel get into space? The Hamster Wheel Nebula (Longmore 8) was discovered by Andrew Longmore in 1976 as a part of a larger survey of the southern sky. This survey employed several improvements in photographic technology, including the use of highly sensitive film, to capture deeper and fainter objects on plates that were examined by eye and catalogued. The featured image, taken at Observatorio El Sauce in Chile, depicts an intricate wheel structure of glowing hydrogen that was thrown out into space by a dying star and ionized by the leftover white dwarf. This structure...

Explanation: While cruising around Saturn, be on the lookout for picturesque arrangements of moons, rings, and shadows. One such striking sight occurred in 2005 and was captured by the then Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft. In the featured image, moons Mimas (left) and Tethys (right) are visible on either side of Saturn's thin rings, which are seen nearly edge-on. Across the top of Saturn are dark shadows of the wide rings, exhibiting their impressive complexity. The violet-light image brings up the texture of the backdrop: Saturn's clouds. Cassini orbited Saturn from 2004 until mid-2017, when the robotic spacecraft was directed to dive...

On June 27, the asteroid will approach at a distance of around 0.01715 astronomical units. It hasn't been this close since at least 1600 CE. Potentially hazardous asteroid 152637 (1997 NC1) seen by the Virtual Telescope Project, when it was around 10.5 million kilometers (6.5 million miles) from Earth. Image credit: Gianluca Masi/The Virtual Telescope Project Potentially hazardous asteroid 152637 (1997 NC1) is about to make its closest approach in over 400 years, in an event only seen once every decade. At these distances, and given the size of the asteroid, it should be possible to view using a small...

Explanation: What's happening to this Sun-crossing rocket? The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, visible on the upper left, launched only about one minute before this amazing image was captured. As it rose to low Earth orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA, in late May, the rocket became supersonic before it crossed the disk of the distant Sun -- from the perspective of the well-placed photographer. The spacecraft's high speed caused bow-shaped compressed-air shockwaves to form across leading surfaces, with at least three visible even outside the Sun's disk because they refract sunlight. The trailing exhaust caused turbulence visible on the lower...

Explanation: Venus and Jupiter may have caught your attention lately. The recent close conjunction of the two brightest planets in recent evening skies has been hard to miss. With Jupiter at the top, starting on May 30 and ending on June 8, their close approach was chronicled daily, left to right, in the featured panels from Maharashtra, India. Near the western horizon, the evening sky colors and exposures used for each panel depend on the local conditions near sunset. At their closest on June 9, the celestial pair appeared to be only about three times the width of a full...

While most news reports have focused trivially on Elon Musk’s status as the first trillionaire resulting from SpaceX’s successful initial public offering (IPO) last week, the real story of that IPO has to do with SpaceX itself and how that company’s extremely bright future is going to change human history. Let me run some numbers.

Explanation: In an interplanetary first, on July 19, 2013 Earth was photographed on the same day from two other worlds of the Solar System, innermost planet Mercury and ringed gas giant Saturn. Pictured on the left, Earth is the pale blue dot just below the rings of Saturn, as captured by the robotic Cassini spacecraft then orbiting the outermost gas giant. On that same day people across planet Earth snapped many of their own pictures of Saturn. On the right, the Earth-Moon system is seen against the dark background of space as captured by the sunward MESSENGER spacecraft, then in...

The uncertainty of science: In two somewhat self-righteous press releases today from two different academic organizations, scientists who have been for three decades touting the somewhat uncertain evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, thus requiring the ad hoc creation of something they label “dark energy” to explain it, insisted that their theory is still right despite publication of a paper last year that said their evidence was weak and unconvincing. The headlines of the first press release is especially insulting to the very concept of the scientific method: - Royal Astronomical Society: ‘Crisis averted’ as experts confirm...

The Parker Solar Probe this past week successfully completed its 28th close fly-by of the Sun, zipping past its surface at a distance of only 3.8 million miles. During this solar encounter, which started June 3 and ends Saturday, June 13, Parker’s four scientific instrument packages gathered data from inside the Sun’s atmosphere, or corona. Parker will begin returning detailed spacecraft telemetry on June 14, with science data transmission set to run from Wednesday, June 17 to Tuesday, June 30. …Parker also equaled its record-setting speed of 430,000 mph — a mark that, like Parker’s distance to the Sun, was...

Explanation: To see Venus and Jupiter together this month, you won't need binoculars or even a telescope. Just look up after sunset and you'll find them emerging as the sky grows dark near the western horizon. In fact, on June 9 the two brightest planets were in close conjunction, separated on the sky by less than 2 degrees from our perspective. Since (brighter) inner planet Venus orbits the Sun faster than outer planet Jupiter, it catches up with and passes the outer planet along the ecliptic roughly every 13 months. But every three years or so their resulting conjunction can...