Space has a knack for bending our sense of scale. The Moon feels close enough to touch—after all, we see its craters with ...

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 ...

At the ragged frontier where the Sun’s influence gives way to interstellar space, Voyager 1 has stumbled into something that ...

Designed to unveil distant galaxies, Webb will also cast our stellar neighborhood in a whole new light. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it ...

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 ...