Science

A crescent Venus. Credit: Pete Lawrence

Ashen light: the mystery of Venus’s dark-side glow

An idea crater in Mars's northern polar region, captured by the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter on 21 August 2019. Credit: ESA/Roscosmos/CaSSIS, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Mars is shedding water far quicker than thought

Hot gas in the Phoenix Cluster. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/M.McDonald et al; Radio: NRAO/VLA; Optical: NASA/STScI

Eye On The Sky Supermassive black hole aids star formation in the Phoenix Cluster

Two spiral galaxies captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, K. Larson et al.

Eye On The Sky Two spiral galaxies captured by the Hubble Space Telescope

Spiral Galaxy NGC 1706

Eye On The Sky A Christmas galaxy in full view

Star factory: the Orion A molecular cloud, as captured by the VISTA infrared telescope, contains many young stars. ESO/VISION survey

How do stars form?

Was Itokawa formed by a sub-catastrophic collision? Credit: JAXA

How do binary asteroids form?

Global Positioning System. Credit: NASA

Interview How the Global Positioning System GPS changed the world

Maat Mons on Venus, as seen by the Magellan spacecraft. Simulated colour has been used. Credit: NASA/JPL

A guide to the mountains of Venus

Veil Nebula 24 September 2015. A small section of the outer shell of the Veil Nebula, the remnant of a star’s violent death 8,000 years ago. Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team

Gallery 21 incredible Hubble Space Telescope images of the past decade

The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) was created by using 10 years of Hubble Space Telescope images and reveals galaxies spanning 13.2 billion years in time: about 0.6 years after the birth of the Universe. The deep field captures such distant light, most of the galaxies are seen as they existed in their infancy. Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch (University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team

Interview What happened during the first seconds of the Universe?

An artist's impression of the Giant Magellan Telescope as it will appear once complete. Credit: GMTO Corporation

Interview The construction and science behind the Giant Magellan Telescope

An artist's impression of asteroids. Credit: NASA

3200 Phaethon: the asteroid that causes the Geminid meteor shower

A cataclysmic flare, propelled from the heart of the Milky Way 3.5 million years ago, was felt 200,000 lightyears away. Credit: James Josephides/Thorsten Tepper-Garcia/ASTRO 3D

Observations shed light on the history of our Galaxy’s supermassive black hole

Artist's impression of lightning storms on Jupiter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/JunoCam

Could exoplanets host a global electric current?