Determining how much stuff is a single light year is daunting, considering how big the Milky Way is. But doing the math, we find that the answer is close to nothing

Mercury and Earth are a study in contrasts, with serious differences in their orbits, atmospheres, surface temperatures, and annual/diurnal cycles. But they do have a few things in common.

Light travels at a speed of 299,792,458 m/s (1080 million km/h; 671 million mph), which works out to about 9,460.5 billion km (5,878.5 billion miles) per year.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL – Spectacular 4th of July fireworks are coming tonight, July 3, to the Florida Space Coast courtesy of SpaceX and Intelsat with the planned near dusk launch of the commercial Epic 35e next-generation high throughput satellite to geostationary orbit for copious customers in the Americas, Europe and Africa. UPDATE: After a 2nd abort launch is now NET July 5. JULY 5 UPDATE: GO for launch attempt tonight at 7:37 PM. Weather looks good at this time

Located in the constellation Virgo, and at a distance of 55.9 million light years from Earth, is Messier 49 - an elliptical galaxy that is part of the Virgo cluster

PORT CANAVERAL/KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL - The launch cadence at Elon Musk's SpaceX is truly ramping up with Falcon 9 boosters rapidly coming and going in all directions from ground to space as the firm audaciously sets its sight on a third commercial payload orbital launch on July 2 in the span of just 9 days from its East and West Coast launch bases.

We've only seen Uranus and Neptune one time up close. There are now some mission ideas in the works that might take us back.

Of all the planets in the Solar System. Mercury is now the regarded as the smallest, with a mean radius of 2440 km (0.38 times that of Earth).

An angry monster lurks in the shoulder of the Hunter. We're talking about the Red Giant star Betelgeuse, Alpha Orionis in the constellation Orion. Recently, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) gave us an amazing view of Betelgeuse, one of the very few stars resolved as anything more than a point of light.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL - With Sunday's successful Falcon 9 blastoff for Iridium Communications joining rocketry's history books, Elon Musk's SpaceX accomplished a double headed American space spectacular this weekend with 2 launches and 2 booster landings in 2 days from 2 coasts for 2 commercial customers - in a remarkably rapid turnaround feat that set a new record for minimum time between launches for SpaceX.

A new study by a team of astronomers from the LPL indicates that the orbital inclinations of distant Kuiper Belt Objects could hint at the existence of a Mars-sized body in the area.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL - In another breakthrough milestone aimed at slashing the high cost of rocketry, the innovators at billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's SpaceX successfully launched a 'used' rocket for only the second time in history - that blazed a path to orbit with its BulgariaSat-1 commercial television comsat payload Friday afternoon, June 23, from the Kennedy Space Center and just minutes later landed upright and intact on an oceanic platform waiting offshore in the vast currents of the Atlantic ocean.

A team from SINTEF, and with the support of the ESA is looking to develop snake robots to assist astronauts aboard the ISS and conduct missions to asteroids, the Moon and Mars.