What are the bright flashes coming from Ceres, the dwarf planet between Mars and Jupiter?

The dwarf planet, Ceres, continues to puzzle NASA scientists as its Dawn spacecraft approaches the planet to begin its orbit around the mysterious object. The latest images from Dawn were taken about 29,000 miles away from Ceres and have revealed two mysterious bright flashes of light on the planet’s surface. The two bright spots of…

Scientists operating the world’s most powerful digital camera, the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera, were “shocked” to find Comet Lovejoy ambling through its field of view this week. Luckily for us however, the photobomb has provided us with a stunning view of Comet Lovejoy.

Titan, one of Saturn’s 60 something moons, is covered with lakes and seas of liquid methane which means landing a spaceship on Titan would be quite difficult. But landing a spaceship *under* the methane seas of Titan… well, that’s an entirely new set of problems – and NASA intends to figure out how to do…

Researchers in China have discovered a massive black hole that is 12 billion times the size of the sun. 12 billion times as big as our gigantic Sun! For reference, a billion is a thousand millions or 1 with nine zeroes after it. If you counted every second of your life, you’d only live a…

Research out of Norway drew a surprising conclusion this week – sunspots appear to shorten a person’s lifespan by over half a decade. Researchers studied more than 9,062 Norwegian births from 1676 to 1878 and using the occurrence of sunspots, a barometer of sorts for solar activity, found that lifespans were shorter by slightly over…

The iconic photo of the Eagle nebula’s “Pillars of Creation”, showing three “trunks” of gas and dust forming new stars, was taken in 1995 by the Hubble telescope. In 2014, after installation of a new camera with twice the resolution of the earlier one, a new hi-def photo of the Pillars of Creation has been…

Forget the often-disappointing Perseids meteor shower – Geminids is not only better, it’s predicted to be especially cool this weekend. The Geminids shower has been strengthening in recent years and already surpasses every meteor shower of the year. This year, we’re holding out hope that the show is even better than last year’s brilliant display.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory published a perplexing photo yesterday along with the question, “What is this enigmatic landform?” The photo shows a large, 1.2 mile wide, circular structure (the lab rats think it’s a a giant mutant Martian amoeba) surrounded by a sea of smooth-looking lava flows. NASA scientists believe the mound may be lava…

While the Philae probe naps on the surface of Comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko, scientists found that the comet is singing a lullaby to the sleepy little probe – albeit not quite the sweet soothing melody your mother sings.

Scientists using the W. M. Keck II Telescope in August captured some pretty amazing pictures of eight massive bright spots on Uranus. Appearing to be massive firestorms, the bright spots are actually the wavelength of storms in the Uranus atmosphere. Scientists believe the flashes of light are caused by methane gas rising into the atmosphere,…