Spica is one of the brighter stars in the night sky, so its always easy to pick out. But its especially easy to find tonight, because it huddles especially close to the Moon. They climb into good vi

Astronomers have been studying the star cluster Messier 36 for almost four centuries. Yet they still aren’t sure about its details. There’s disagreement about its distance, its age, and th

Space weather could be especially stormy this year. A forecast issued late last year said the Sun’s current cycle of magnetic activity should peak sometime this year. And the peak should be a lo

Perhaps the most important number that astronomers need to know about a star is its distance. That allows them to calculate the star’s true brightness, which helps them calculate the star’

The Moon and the star Regulus move across the sky together tonight. Regulus is to the upper right of the Moon as they climb into good view, around 8 or 8:30.The name “Regulus” means &ldquo

If you’re driving up the highway from Dallas to Minneapolis, you might rely on the Global Positioning System to help get you there. If GPS didn’t take the equations of Albert Einstein into

No two clocks in the universe appear to tick at exactly the same rate. That’s because no two clocks move at exactly the same speed, or feel exactly the same gravitational pull. Even two clocks o

ASTRONAUTS: There’s a chunk there that we can get. That’s a big fragment within this crystalline rock. Take a picture of that…Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt were

The earliest galaxies were a lot busier than their modern-day counterparts. They were giving birth to stars at a much faster rate. That included many stars that were especially hot and heavy. Those st

The most-distant objects we can see are galaxies more than 13 billion light-years away. That means we see them as they looked just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. We know their distanc