On Monday, May 9, most people on Earth will be able to look up and watch Mercury pass in front of the sun, something that hasn’t been seen in almost 10 years. The transit of Mercury occurs about 13 times every 100 years, with the next one coming in 2019, according to Space.com. While most will be in theline of sight to see the passing, there will be some areas blocked from seeing a silhouette of Mercury float across the...

A new topographical map released by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory on Friday shows that Mercury would be a hiker’s dream, minus the temperatures that reach over 800degrees Fahrenheit, of course. About one year after the Messenger, a spacecraft that spent nearly five years orbiting the closest planet to the sun, ended its mission by slamming into Mercury, scientists revealed the first global elevation map of the planet ever produced. The APL found the planet’s highest point to...

Four images from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with color data from the Ralph instrument to create this global view of Pluto. The images, taken when the spacecraft was 280,000 miles (450,000 kilometers) away from Pluto, show features as small as 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers). (NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI) Even after officially demoting it to a dwarf planet, researchers still aren’t quite sure what to make of Pluto. A recently published study makes categorizing the former planet even more...

The Milky Way just got a lot more crowded - with planets. NASA on Tuesday announced 1,284 new planets orbiting stars outside our solar system, called exoplanets. That's on top of the approximately 1,000 previously authenticated exoplanets detected by the Kepler Space Telescope since its launch in 2009. Scientists taking part in the news conference were ecstatic - it's the biggest planetary collection ever verified in a single swoop. "One of the great questions of all time, and one of...

Of all the amazing sights one might see on the ISS– stars, planets, comets and more– one thing you don't want to see is a crack in the window. But that's exactly what a recent tweet from European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Tim Peake showed: an impact chip in a window on Cupola, an observation and work area where the astronauts operate the robotic arms on the station. Understandably, it's since gone viral. The photo, which was taken last month,...

Gorgeous photos show Mercury’s surface in stunning detail. ...

Oxygen has been found in Mars' atmosphere, but before you go thinking about moving to the first Mars colony, there are a few things you should know. Yes, a study published this week in Astronomy & Astrophysics announced the detection of oxygen in the upper atmosphere of Mars. But it's not the oxygen you think it is. Unlike the O2 we know and love that allows us to breathe here on Earth, the oxygen detected on Mars is just plain...

A photo of a tiny crack in the window of the International Space Station is going viral. ...

Telescope detects single-atom oxygen in Mars’s atmosphere. ...

NASA working with private companies Boeing and SpaceX to send astronauts to the International Space Station ...

A tiny speck of space junk chipped the window on the International Space Station ...

Astronaut Jeff Williams captured a stunning sight from the International Space Station. ...