Comets are known for providing breathtaking observations of their long and shiny tails when they travel too close to the Sun. This happens because comets are made of ice and primarily orbit far from the Sun, but as their icy core heats up it evaporates, resulting in the aforementioned breathtaking observations. But while evaporating comets make for great public photos, scientists who study comets are focused on these snowballs of gas and dust and how they are remnants of the origins of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.

The worlds of the Solar System offer up exciting and (so far) mostly pristine places for planetary scientists to study. As space missions continue to travel to Mars, Europa, asteroids, and other worlds, questions keep coming up about keeping them safe for continued exploration and observations.

Combining over 20 years of archival data from Hubble with new data from the James Webb Space Telescope, a team of astronomers has found the first of the "missing" black holes.

What do you call a Jupiter-like object that orbits the brown dwarf companion of a star? Is it a planet, a moon, or something new?

The collapsing stars Eddington swore couldn't exist turned out to be everywhere, and half a century later the world handed Chandrasekhar his Nobel. How the 1.4 solar mass limit became one of the most important numbers in modern astronomy.

Galaxies attract cold gas from the intergalactic medium and turn it into stars. But the JWST has found galaxies that aren't forming stars in the early Universe, long before they should've become quiescent. In at least one instance involving the Red Potato Galaxy, an AGN jet from a neighbouring galaxy is the likely culprit.

Astronomers aren't certain where Fast Radio Bursts come from. But they still have utility. They can use them to find the Universe's "missing matter."

The Milky Way has two disks, the thin disk where most of the stars dwell, and the thick disk, populated by much older stars. The ESA's Gaia mission showed us that the thick disk rotates more slowly than the thin disk. The culprit, according to powerful simulations, was a disk flip in the MW's past, driven by a merger.

Driven from Europe by the feud, Chandrasekhar rebuilt his life in America and turned mastery-and-move-on into an art form. On his conviction that beautiful physics is true physics, and the two students he drove through blizzards to teach.

Astronomers have conclusively identified a source of the highest energy cosmic ray protons in the Milky Way, solving a long standing puzzle near the star Altair. By combining gamma ray, radio, and X-ray data from three separate observatories, a Hiroshima University led team ruled out competing explanations and confirmed the object as a genuine “PeVatron”. These natural particle accelerators are far more powerful than anything humans have ever built and helps us in the hunt for similar sources across the Galaxy.

Martian dust storms are some of the most fascinating and mysterious planetary surface processes ever observed, as Earth, Mars, and Saturn’s moon Titan are the only known planetary bodies to have active dust storms. However, the major difference for Mars is its dust storms can blanket the entire planet at once, resulting in the surface becoming completely unobservable and blocking out sunlight, with the scientific community concerned this might hinder robotic, and even human, space exploration. But what if covering the surface and blocking sunlight wasn’t the only issue Martian global dust storms pose for future missions?

NASA's Psyche mission used a gravity assist maneuver at Mars to gain velocity and adjust its trajectory to its eventual target. The asteroid 16 Psyche is a metal-rich asteroid that may be the remnant rocky core of a protoplanet. The flyby not only shepherded the spacecraft on to its target, it was also an opportunity to test Psyche's science instruments and cameras. NASA has released a timelapse of the flyby.

Spiral galaxies, including grand spirals like the Whirlpool galaxy, are plentiful. But it's still a mystery how their spiral arms form and persist for hundreds of millions of years, and why some galaxies have one, two, or three or more arms. New research based on Euclid data finds links between galaxy mass, star formation rate, and number of arms, and hints at their formation.

Our ability to track and visualize small rocks in space is still improving. And occasionally we’ll find a space rock that will remind us of that fact. One such rock is detailed in a new paper, led by Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and recently published in Nature Astronomy, where the research team discovered what they thought was a normal, run of the mill asteroid, was actually a “dark comet”.

On Earth, it’s hard to track events that reshape its surface, as the surface itself is being reshaped constantly by weather and tectonic or volcanic upheavals. However, the Moon is much more static, and scientists have been slowly unraveling a pattern that is noticeable in its craters - that something dramatic happened around 800 million years ago. A new paper by researchers at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), led by Dr. William F. Bottke, and accepted for publication in the Planetary Science Journal, suggests they might have found a culprit - the parent body of a family of asteroids now known as Eulalia.

A low-number periodic comet is stalking our fair planet this summer, and putting on its best show of several generations. We’re talking about Comet 10P/Tempel. The comet is currently loitering in the early dawn sky, presenting a good target for large binoculars or a small telescope. But act fast, as the comet is taking the plunge southward in August, post-perihelion.

In 1935 the most eminent astronomer alive stood up in a packed room and called Chandrasekhar's discovery "stellar buffoonery." The story of Arthur Eddington's years-long campaign against a result that everyone privately knew was correct.

An international team of Earth scientists has narrowed down the class of impactor that caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. According to their findings, it was a rare type of rock that originated in the outer Solar System.

Scientists have painted the most detailed portrait yet of the planetary system orbiting Barnard’s Star. Unfortunately, the picture is not encouraging, as all four planets appear to be "extremely uninhabitable."

Astronomers have found four new white dwarfs within about 65 light years. Even though the sky has been studied thoroughly, these escaped detection. That's because they're tight binaries with red dwarf partners, and the much brighter red dwarfs hide the white dwarfs. The binaries used to share common envelopes.