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Artist’s illustration of SpaceIL’s lander on the surface of the moon. A $30 million private race to the moon will lose one of its five finalists, barring a holiday miracle.  The Israeli team SpaceIL will have to drop out of the Google Lunar X Prize (GLXP) if the group cannot raise $7.5 million by Dec. 20, […]

Three International Space Station crewmembers from Russia, Italy and the United States are back on Earth, having landed after five months aboard the orbiting outpost. Russian cosmonaut Sergey Ryazanskiy, Paolo Nespoli of the European Space Agency (ESA) and astronaut Randy Bresnik of NASA touched down on Russia’s Soyuz MS-05 spacecraft on Thursday (Dec. 14), landing […]

Volunteers care for stranded pilot whales on Feb. 11, 2017, at Farewell Spit on New Zealand. Dolphins, whales and other cetaceans are found stranded along coasts worldwide, and now scientists are turning to NASA satellite data to figure out how the animals get off course. The cause of the mass strandings remains a topic of […]

An overhead image, captured by a satellite, reveals the baby island. A baby island burst out of the South Pacific Ocean three years ago during a volcanic explosion in the Polynesian kingdom of Tonga, and now NASA scientists think it could be here to stay for decades. When the new landmass, dubbed Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, […]

An artist’s illustration of NASA’s Deep Space Gateway, which the space agency aims to be humanity’s foothold for deep-space exploration beyond Earth orbit. There will be a market for humanity’s expansion beyond Earth orbit, industry experts said — but none of them can predict what form that market will take. The International Space Station, in […]

The Ursids produce a handful of meteors or shooting stars every hour, usually in the range of five to 10 per hour. While it’s one of the lesser showers of the year, in 2017 skywatchers will be treated to only a crescent moon around sunset, making it easy to see the meteors in dark skies. […]

A seasonally appropriate blizzard of stars fills this Hubble Space Telescope view of a cluster located 41,000 light-years from Earth. The image captures 150,000 glittering stars. Globular star clusters like this one, called Messier 79 or NGC 1904, contain some of the galaxy’s oldest stars — some reaching an astonishing 11.7 billion years old, researchers […]

Artist’s illustration of a hypothetical planet covered in water in the binary star system Kepler-35AB. The art of exoplanet detection is on the upswing, and scientists are perhaps at the cusp of a watershed moment — detecting life on other worlds.  To date, ground- and space-based telescopes have discovered more than 3,500 confirmed planets circling […]

If it’s clear outside on Wednesday night (Dec. 13) and Thursday morning (Dec. 14) before dawn, be sure to go outdoors. One of the year’s top meteor showers, the Geminids, will peak, with rates as high as one or two meteors per minute at around 10 p.m. local time. However, the show will start around […]

Three space travelers will depart from the International Space Station (ISS) tonight after a six-month stay aboard the orbiting laboratory.  Cramped inside a small Soyuz space capsule, NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik, European Space Agency astronaut Paolo Nespoli and Russian cosmonaut Sergey Ryazanskiy will undock from the ISS early tomorrow morning (Dec. 14) at 12:14 a.m. […]

The Veil Nebula, in the constellation Cygnus, is one of the most massive and brilliant features in the x-ray sky. The universe through the eyes of an astronomer or astrophysicist is a fascinating place — and a good book can give you a glimpse of that world without requiring years of study. Here are the Space.com […]

Rey, played by Daisy Ridley, trains in the ways of the Force in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” This article was originally published at The Conversation.  The publication contributed the article to Live Science’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights . As “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” opens in theaters and its heroine Rey seeks to learn the […]

Mild spoilers ahead. STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDIWritten by Rian JohnsonDirected by Rian JohnsonFeaturing Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Lupita Nyong’o, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, Laura Dern, Benicio Del Toro, Gwendolyn Christie, and Peter Mayhew Early in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, writer/director Rian Johnson’s unenviable attempt to […]