Astronomy

Meet Nancy Grace Roman, the "mother" of the Hubble Space Telescope

She discovered fundamental truths about stars and galaxies, and also shaped NASA into what we know it as today

Meet Evelyn Boyd Granville, the mathematician who mass produced computers and shot Apollo into space

One of the first Black women to earn a PhD in math, she worked on seemingly every major math project of the 20th century

Produced in partnership with NPR Scicommers

A map of Mars's ancient rivers unlocks new possibilities for learning about the Red Planet

The same tools scientists use to understand Earth's climate history may work on Mars, too

The planet Venus, second planet from the Sun

Let's go to Venus!

NASA's new DAVINCI+ and VERITAS missions will explore Venus

How a scientist in a potato field founded the field of radio astronomy

Karl Guthe Jansky, hired to quiet hiss on long-distance phone calls, found radio waves coming from Sagittarius

The first ever image of a black hole's swirling magnetic field is released

The Event Horizon Telescope has taken a new image of black hole M87, revealing its magnetic field

How dark is outer space? The New Horizons spacecraft is helping astronomers find out

Measurements from beyond Pluto shed light on the "fossil record" of our universe

NASA's Perseverance Rover has landed on Mars

NASA's latest Mars rover and its partner helicopter Ingenuity have touched down safely

Astronomers are turning orbits and planetary rings into mournful, loud music

Modern astronomers are picking up where Kepler left off. In Mars's winds and Saturn's rings, they find music

Meet Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who figured out what the universe is made of

Stifled by sexism in Europe, she made foundational discoveries in astronomy after coming to the US

Galaxies are eating each other and the Milky Way might be next

Astronomers see a trail of destruction in the patterns of Andromeda's stars.

Meet Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the astrophysicist who first noticed pulsars

Through sheer tenacity she has forged a career in a male-dominated field

The Moon's origins may be far different than we thought

We're still learning the basics about Earth's nearest neighbor

Meet Vera Rubin, the stargazer who predicted dark matter

From childhood, she preferred 'to stay up and watch the stars than go to sleep'