In the 1990s, during breaks from editing the film First Knight, starring Sean Connery, Walter Murch was reading The Sleepwalkers, a book on the history of cosmology, by the Hungarian-British…

It was a little before 7 in the morning in western Russia when Major Tom reentered the atmosphere. Though he had no window to see the approaching Earth, the return had been announced…

To see additional images from NASA Ames, click the icon on the image at the top of this page.NASA Ames is filled with the exotic technologies of a future that didn’t quite come to…

If you see a car along that road,” Tyler Nordgren warned me, “don’t look at the headlights. It’ll ruin your night vision for 2 hours.” Nordgren and I had pitched our tents…

I have seen the future of space exploration, and it looks like a cue ball covered with brown scribbles. I am talking about Europa, the 1,940-mile-wide, nearly white, and exceedingly…

A team of astronomers announced this year that they had found no fewer than eight planets orbiting the so-called Goldilocks zone around their parent stars, inside which the temperatures…

The most arrogant astronomer in Switzerland in the mid-20th century was a solar physicist named Max Waldmeier. Colleagues were so relieved when he retired in 1980 that they nearly…

It’s always a mistake to read,” Philip Marcus, a computational physicist and a professor in the mechanical engineering department at the University of California, Berkeley, tells…

At some point in our lives, we are confronted with something we fear is larger than ourselves, and with nowhere else to turn, we peer up to the heavens. There are also those among…

Here’s a riddle. We’ve never seen any, and we don’t know if they exist, but we think about them, debate them, and shout at each other about them. What are they? Aliens, of course.…