At the edge of our solar system, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has detected a stunning “wall of fire,” a boundary where ...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Final steps are underway here to prepare the next sun-observing spacecraft, a $1.5 billion joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), for launch. Dubbed ...

Modern astronomy is giving us unprecedented views of the asteroids, comets, and other small bodies that litter our cosmic ...

Approximately 4.5 billion years ago, a cold cloud of gas and dust buried deep in one of the Milky Way galaxy’s spiral arms started to collapse. From there, gravity worked its magic. The cloud began to ...

It's a tale with many twists and turns, and quite a bit of violence. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Paul M. Sutter is an ...

There’s a bit of a paradox about our galaxy: it’s both jam-packed with stars and cavernously empty. The Milky Way is crowded in the sense that it holds hundreds of billions of stars, as well as ...

This story appears in the July 2013 issue of National Geographic magazine. The dust speck had been plucked from the tail of a comet more than 200 million miles away. Now, under an electron microscope ...