Space

A flowery passage in a 6,000-year-old Hindu text may be the earliest known reference to a solar eclipse, describing the sun as being "pierced" with darkness and gloom and proposing that evil beings had caused the sun's "magic arts to vanish."

On Wednesday (Sept. 4), astronomers spotted a never-before-seen asteroid, 2024 RW1, around eight hours before it entered Earth's atmosphere. The "harmless" space rock quickly burned up as predicted, creating a bright green streak across the night sky before spectacularly exploding.

A NASA spacecraft erected a large, foil solar sail in orbit around Earth last week, after a failed attempt days earlier. However, subsequent observations of the spacecraft show it is "tumbling or wobbling" through space, which may have also impacted its trajectory around our planet.

The average number of visible dark patches on the sun's surface in August was higher than any other month since September 2001. The final count was more than twice as high as experts initially predicted it would be.

Saturn will enter opposition on Sept. 7 and 8, orbiting on the opposite side of Earth as the sun. Here's everything you need to know to spot Saturn at its peak size and brightness this week.

'The bottom line is, there is no crisis in terms of the standard model of cosmology.

Although no aliens were found, the results have helped constrain expectations of possible alien transmitter power.

NGC 6744 is a spiral galaxy bigger than, but otherwise very similar to, our own. NASA has dubbed the large spiral galaxy the Milky Way’s ‘big brother’.

A mysterious ring invisible at all wavelengths except radio could be a trace of a dramatically unstable star shedding its skin.