For the first time in over fifty years, humans are going back to the Moon. This time, it is not just to visit. NASA’s Artemis program is a new generation of missions with a huge goal: to build a long-term human presence on the Moon. This means learning to live and work on another world. … Read more
Mars has captured our attention for centuries. We see it as a glowing red dot in the night sky, and we have sent rovers and orbiters to explore its dusty, rocky landscape. We often talk about it as a potential future home for humans or wonder if life once existed there. The rovers we send … Read more
Our universe is filled with wonders, and for the first time in history, we have a tool powerful enough to peek into the atmospheres of planets many light-years away. This tool is the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). In its quest to understand the cosmos, JWST has been studying a particularly interesting planet called K2-18b. … Read more
Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is almost impossibly large. It contains hundreds of billions of stars. For a long time, we could only guess if those stars had planets. Now, we know they do. As of 2025, scientists have confirmed the existence of over 6,000 planets outside our own solar system, and that number … Read more
For many years, when scientists talked about finding life on other planets, they were usually looking for “biosignatures.” These are signs of life itself, like oxygen or methane gas, that living things might produce. But in recent years, the conversation has shifted to something new, and perhaps even more exciting: “technosignatures.” Instead of just looking … Read more
Our solar system feels huge to us. It is home to our planet, Earth, and all the other planets we know, like Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. All these planets, along with many asteroids and comets, circle our star, the Sun. For all of human history, this has been our neighborhood. We have sent robotic probes … Read more
The space next door, cosmically speaking, is the Alpha Centauri system. It is the closest star system to our own, a place astronomers have dreamed of visiting for centuries. This system is special because it has not one, but three stars. Two of them, Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, are very much like … Read more
The TRAPPIST-1 system has been one of the most exciting discoveries in modern astronomy. Located about 40 light-years away, this one star system has not one, not two, but seven planets all roughly the same size as Earth. This discovery gave scientists and space lovers a huge amount of hope. For the first time, we … Read more
For more than 75 years, most of us learned that our solar system had nine planets. We memorized their names, and Pluto was always the last one on the list: the small, icy world at the edge. But in 2006, scientists made a big announcement that changed our textbooks. They decided Pluto was no longer … Read more
When we think about black holes, the first thing that often comes to mind is their incredible power to pull things in. They are famous for being “points of no return,” places where gravity is so strong that once you get too close, you can never escape. This boundary, the “point of no return,” is … Read more