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…

Nearing the 25th anniversary since its launch, the Hubble Space Telescope, still orbiting 350 miles above earth, has revolutionized humanity’s understanding of the universe and changed…

Daniel Wolf Savin likes to joke that his astrophysics lab at Columbia University, which researches the birth of stars, should be called the “Genesis Lab.” “If you read Genesis,…

The biggest merger to ever hit these parts is coming—a union that promises to be more tumultuous than that of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, offer more star power than Brangelina,…

Astronomy and biology have been circling each other with timid infatuation since the first time a human thought about the possibility of other worlds and other suns. But the melding…

You and I have homes, but do stars and planets? After a fashion, yes—solar systems are shaped from clouds of interstellar gas known as protosolar nebulae. Because nebulae have identifying…

I am a staunch believer in leading with the bad news, so let me get straight to the point. Earth, our anchor and our solitary haven in a hostile universe, is in a precarious situation.…

The history of human exploration has always been tied to the search for a destination. Space travel is no different: The Apollo program, which ferried humans to the moon, was not only…

It might sound strange to you, but a telescope is no less a vessel of exploration than the ones used by ancient explorers to discover new continents. Telescopes give us glimpses of…