Follow the foot traffic. Sidewalk astronomers often set up at street fairs, outdoor events, nightlife hotspots, or by any venue where a lot of people tend to pass by. If you want to set up at an event ...

In February 2026, Jennifer Vaughn took the helm as chief executive officer of The Planetary Society. Jenn first joined the Society’s staff in 1997 as an editorial assistant for The Planetary Report, ...

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is one of the most daring missions in the Solar System. Led by the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, the mission made history in 2021 when it became the ...

HANNAH WAKEFORD is the Giacconi Fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. GJ1214b GJ 1214b is a "super-Earth" orbiting a small star located 40 light-years from our solar ...

Learn how our members and community are changing the worlds.

Should I be worried about asteroids hitting Earth? You shouldn’t lose sleep over it. Damaging asteroids do not hit Earth very often. But you should care about it, because dangerous asteroids have ...

The odds of there being other planets like Earth in the Universe are heavily stacked in our favor. If every planet in our galaxy were the size of a basketball, you could stretch them in a line from ...

When an astrobiologist says “life is hard,” they may be speaking on a cosmic level. They could mean that life itself is a puzzle we are nowhere near solving. “We’re like second graders when it comes ...

Our search for planets around other stars in our galaxy has yielded us more than 4,500 worlds. Quite a few of these exoplanets seem to be Earth-like, where surface conditions could sustain liquid ...

We’re not the only world with dazzling auroras. Moons, planets, and even comets can have their own light shows, and some are very different from what we have on Earth. Auroras can be big or small, ...

If you’re getting ready to witness an eclipse, you’ll encounter some vocabulary that you might not know. Here is your complete guide to the terminology used to talk about total solar eclipses, partial ...

In the time it takes our planet to go around the Sun, we do a lot of exploring. This year, new missions took off, a powerful observatory began examining the sky, and seasoned spacecraft kept up their ...