Fossilized microbial mats known as stromalites provide important records of some of Earth’s earliest life.Credit: Jon G. Fuller/VW Pics/UIG via Getty Earth & Life: A Four Billion Year Conversation Andrew H. Knoll Princeton Univ. Press (2026) On 14 February 1990, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft turned around briefly to snap a picture of Earth before heading
Explanation: It looks like a view from the Little Prince’s planet. The featured image is a throwback to the 2024 Perseid meteor shower, surrounded in this projection by the Bieszczady Mountains in Poland. Visible in the sky is the arch of the Milky Way, along with several nebulas in red and over a hundred meteors
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Fifty years ago, NASA’s Viking 1 and 2 landers made the first successful landings on Mars, opening a new era in planetary exploration. Behind that achievement was a team at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, whose consistent leadership and technical expertise helped turn an ambitious idea into a mission that reshaped the way
Astronomers have confirmed for the first time the existence of a rocky planet with an atmosphere that is also located in what is known as the habitable zone. Located 48 light-years away, the exoplanet (that is, a planet outside our solar system) may be the most similar to Earth that researchers have found. If it’s
Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a giant planet outside our solar system, called an exoplanet, hidden within one of the most intensively studied planetary systems in our Milky Way galaxy. The nearby young star Beta Pictoris was already known to host two giant planets: Beta Pictoris b, one of the first