StarDate

People collect all kinds of things, from baseball cards to Persian rugs. Over the past 40 years, some NASA aircraft have collected dust – grains of dust from beyond Earth. Many of the collection efforts have taken place during meteor showers. That’s included the Geminid shower, which is at its peak tonight.

A meteor shower takes place when Earth flies through a trail of particles that were shed by a comet or asteroid. M...

A couple of thousand years ago, a large asteroid or comet might have been blasted apart. And we’re still seeing the fireworks from its destruction – as the Geminid meteor shower, which will reach its peak tomorrow night.

Most meteor showers flare to life when Earth passes through the orbital path of a comet. The comet sheds bits of rock and dirt, which spread out along its orbit. As Earth flies through this trail of deb...

The Sun isn’t easy to influence. It’s more than a thousand times the mass of Jupiter, the solar system’s largest planet, and more than 330,000 times the mass of Earth. Even so, a recent study says the planets might influence our star’s magnetic cycle – perhaps making conditions more comfortable for life.

The Sun goes through many cycles of magnetic activity. The best known lasts an average of 11 years....

Storms on the Sun can cause all kinds of problems. They can knock out satellites and black out power grids. They can interfere with GPS and disrupt some radio broadcasts. They can even have an impact on human health.

Solar storms happen when the Sun’s magnetic field gets tangled up. Lines of magnetic force can snap, then reconnect. That produces outbursts of radiation and charged particles. When the particles hit Earth, they&...

The Moon and the heart of the lion just miss each other tonight – at least as seen from the United States. As they climb into good view, after midnight, the Moon and the star Regulus will be separated by just a skosh. The farther north and east your location, the closer together they’ll appear. From some spots, they’ll be almost touching.

And from much of Canada across to northern Norway they will touch – th...

A couple of years ago, a space telescope discovered something odd about NGC 6505. The galaxy is encircled by a ring. It isn’t part of the galaxy itself. Instead, it’s an image of a background galaxy – one that’s billions of light-years farther.

Einstein Rings are named for Albert Einstein because they were predicted by his theory of gravity. The gravity of a foreground object acts as a lens – it bends ...

The Moon is a “dead” world. It trembles with a few small moonquakes, and there may be occasional “burps” of gas. But for the most part, not much happens inside it.

That’s definitely not the case for one of the moons of the giant planet Jupiter. Io is the most volcanically active world in the solar system. It’s covered by hundreds of volcanoes and pools of hot lava. Some of the volcanoes are large...

The Moon forms a beautiful grouping with the planet Jupiter and the twins of Gemini tonight. Jupiter looks like a brilliant star. It’s below the Moon as they climb into view, by about 8:30. Castor, the fainter of Gemini’s twins, is to the left of the Moon. And Pollux, the brighter twin, is to the lower left. The grouping is even tighter at first light tomorrow.

The Moon circles through Gemini roughly once a month –...

For radio astronomers, there’s some good news and some bad news. On the good side, a pilot project with SpaceX has devised a way to reduce the radio interference produced by satellites. On the bad side, the satellites can produce accidental interference.

Radio telescopes tell us things about the universe that we can’t get any other way. But the telescopes are extremely sensitive. Transmissions from an orbiting satellite...