Last week we talked about Fermi the man, now we're going to talk about Fermi the space telescope. That's right, Enrico Fermi made such an impact in the astronomy and physics community that he got a space telescope named after him. Let's take a look at what this mission will do, and its...

Deep field image by Hubble What if our universe was just one in an infinite number of parallel universes; a possible outcome from the specific predictions of quantum mechanics. The idea of multiple universes is common in science fiction, but is there any actual science to back this theory up? ...

Every now and then, the Moon destroys the Sun. Okay, not destroys, covers. Well, not really covers, but from here on Earth, sitting inside the shadow of the Moon, that's what it sure looks like. These events are called eclipses, or more precisely, transits and occultations. They occur whenever one...

Artist's illustration of the dwarf planet Eris. Image credit: NASA Astronomers have been searching for the mysterious Planet X for hundreds of years. It was the search for a theoretical planet beyond Uranus that turned up Neptune, and then again for Pluto. And even now there are some astronomers who...

Artist's illustration of a pulsar Imagine an object with the mass of the Sun, crushed down to the size of Manhattan. Now set that object spinning hundreds of times a second, blasting out powerful beams of radiation like a lighthouse. That's a pulsar, one of the most exotic objects in the Universe. ...

VY Canis Majoris This week we're going to talk about famous stars. But not those boring human ones you read about in People magazine. No, we're talking about those hot balls of plasma across the distant Universe. The close ones, the bright ones, the massive ones, the giant ones. Let's get to...

Artist illustration of a red dwarf star. We think we live near an average star, but that's not the case at all. Compared to most stars in the Universe, the Sun is a giant! Let's look at the small end of the stellar spectrum, to stars with a fraction of the size and mass of our own Sun. There are...

Artist's illustration of a cataclysmic variable Did you know that our Solar System is a rarity with its single star. Astronomers believe that most star systems out there actually contain 2 or more stars – imagine seeing a sky with 4 suns. These binary and multiple star systems are a great target...

The Earth's atmosphere Take a quick breath. There, that's what we're going to talk about today – the atmosphere. And not just the Earth's familiar atmosphere, but the strange, exotic and deadly atmospheres we find in the Solar System and surrounding extrasolar planets. ...

Spiral galaxy M74. Image credit: Hubble Astronomy is one of the scientific fields that have been completely shaken up by new media. The Internet has enabled communication between researchers in a dramatic new way, creating new collaborations, removing obstacles, and drawing in an army of enthusiastic...