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.…

From our perspective here on Earth, constellations appear to be fixed groups of stars, immobile on the sky. But what if we could change that perspective? In reality, it’d be close…

When Justin Kasper, a professor of space physics at the University of Michigan, daydreams, he visualizes a spacecraft the size of a Toyota Prius speeding through the sun’s corona—a…

I interviewed Lord Martin Rees in the 16th-century courtyard of Casina Pio IV in the Vatican Gardens. Originally built as the summer residence of Pope Pius IV, Mozart was rumored to…

For more than half a century, the moon had been mocking the best minds in science, and for Erik Asphaug enough was enough. The taunting began three years before Asphaug was born. On…

I’m in the business of small miracles,” said Ed Krupp, director of Griffith Observatory. “It’s a small miracle to turn visitors into observers, to put them eyeball to eyeball…

Dr. Edwin C. Krupp has spent more than 40 years researching how ancient cultures worshipped and studied the parade of celestial lights—the movement of the sun, moon, planets, and…

When Warner Brothers animators wanted to include cutting-edge astronomy in a 1952 Bugs Bunny cartoon1 they set a scene at an observatory that looks like Palomar Observatory in California.…

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…

Some dark, clear nights, when the blazing stars cast shadows down on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, the astronomer Olivier Guyon steps away from his workbench and computer screens and walks outside…