Wipe the dust off your binoculars and extract the family telescope from the back of the closet: Saturn is about to put on its best and brightest show of the year — an act Jupiter will soon follow.
On Monday evening, Jupiter and Saturn appeared closer to each other in the sky than they have for hundreds of years in what has become known as the Great Conjunction.
At least, that's how it will look to someone craning their head aloft. On the winter solstice, the pair of gas giants will appear closer to each other in the night sky than they have in centuries.
Mars is not compelling as a long-term human destination, says guest blogger Amanda Hendrix. But there's a place in our solar system where conditions are right: Saturn's Moon Titan.
Following on Cassini's discoveries, NASA aims to probe Jupiter's Europa for potential life. With every new world we discover, we should look back at our own planet with awe, says Marcelo Gleiser.
The NASA probe that has spent the past 13 years making countless discoveries about the ringed planet and its moons was taken out of orbit and sent plunging into Saturn's atmosphere.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn on Friday, but we'll always have the shots it took of icy volcanoes, hexagonal storms, ethane lakes and ripples in Saturn's rings.
NASA's probe has spent the past 13 years orbiting Saturn, making a number of important discoveries along the way. On Friday, it will hurl itself into the planet's atmosphere and disintegrate.
A paper exploring the consistency and makeup of Saturn's moon Titan brings joy with discovery as we learn about our universe of wonders, says astrophysicist Adam Frank.
A distant planet has rings so large it makes Saturn look like a child's toy. But, until now, scientists have been baffled about how the enormous rings keep from self-destructing. The answer: spin.
Scientists say the Phoebe ring is "more than 200 times as big across as Saturn itself." They used a special infrared space telescope to get the best look yet at the massive ring of black dust.
Researchers have finally determined the length of a day on the ringed planet (gas shrouds any landmarks, so it was tough). Precision matters: A faster spin influences the speed of surface winds.
It’s no secret that we’re living in Droughtville. With grim regularity, it seems like a few months don’t eke by before there’s a new study that startles researchers into a new level of shock at, yikes, how arid things are in the West ...
