Follow the foot traffic. Sidewalk astronomers often set up at street fairs, outdoor events, nightlife hotspots, or by any venue where a lot of people tend to pass by. If you want to set up at an event ...

Our search for planets around other stars in our galaxy has yielded us more than 4,500 worlds. Quite a few of these exoplanets seem to be Earth-like, where surface conditions could sustain liquid ...

Annular eclipses are a very special type of solar eclipse. During an annular eclipse, the Moon is centered in front of the Sun but doesn’t completely obscure it, instead leaving a ring of sunlight ...

HANNAH WAKEFORD is the Giacconi Fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. GJ1214b GJ 1214b is a "super-Earth" orbiting a small star located 40 light-years from our solar ...

Prior to the inaugural launch of SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft aboard its enormous Super Heavy rocket, environmental policy expert Eric Roesch was outspoken about the likelihood of significant ...

When an astrobiologist says “life is hard,” they may be speaking on a cosmic level. They could mean that life itself is a puzzle we are nowhere near solving. “We’re like second graders when it comes ...

In the time it takes our planet to go around the Sun, we do a lot of exploring. This year, new missions took off, a powerful observatory began examining the sky, and seasoned spacecraft kept up their ...

In February 2026, Jennifer Vaughn took the helm as chief executive officer of The Planetary Society. Jenn first joined the Society’s staff in 1997 as an editorial assistant for The Planetary Report, ...

Psyche will be the first mission ever to a metal-rich asteroid. Its target, also named Psyche, could be the exposed core of a would-be planet, or a core that was smashed and reformed, or an asteroid ...

Whether you’re spotting planets with the naked eye or finding galaxies with a telescope, there are lots of ways you can take in the wonders of the universe from the comfort of Earth. It doesn’t take ...

Though once considered our solar system’s ninth planet, Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006. Pluto is a Kuiper Belt object, meaning it lies within a thick disc of worlds beyond Neptune.