About 7.4 light-years from the Sun, a dim ball of gas about as wide as Jupiter drifts through space with no star to warm it. Jupiter is large enough to fit some 11 Earths side by side. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, nearly 6 trillion miles.) That puts the object […]

Earth has never been a perfect sphere. It bulges slightly at the equator and flattens slightly at the poles, a shape geodesists call an oblate spheroid — think of a basketball very gently squeezed from top and bottom. That bulge isn’t fixed, though, and a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid […]

For the first time, astronomers have pointed NASA’s two flagship space telescopes at the same patch of sky beyond Neptune and let them work as a team. Hubble handled the visible light. Webb handled the infrared. Together, they picked out 27 previously unknown trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs — small, icy bodies that drift in the […]

Picture a moonless night, far from any city. Look straight at the point in the sky opposite the Sun — the antisolar point, where the Sun would appear if you could see it through the Earth. There, faintly, you might make out an oval-shaped glow, 8 to 10 degrees across. For scale, that’s roughly the […]