Astronomy Magazine

“Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction,” by physicist Luis Alvarez, geologist Walter Alvarez, Frank Asaro, and Helen Michel, was published in Science June 6, 1980. In it, the authors propose that an asteroid crashing to Earth was responsible for the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. (The timeline was later amended to 66

Carl Parnell, taken from Dawlish, Devon, UK The Jellyfish Nebula (IC 443 or Sharpless 2–248) is the remnant of a supernova that went off some 30,000 years ago in Gemini. Filling the top half of the image is a glowing molecular complex threaded by multiple dark nebula (LDN 1565–8). The supernova debris plowing into this

Looking for a sky event this week? Check out our full Sky This Week column.  June 5: Check in on Mars Look east around 11 P.M. local daylight time, and you’ll see three bright stars forming a triangle — this is the famous Summer Triangle asterism, which flies high overhead in the middle of short summer nights.

Understanding the nature of our cosmos requires an accurate map of how galaxies are spread throughout it. For decades, astronomers suspected that something vast lurked behind the Milky Way’s dense, dusty disk in our sky. There were indirect, subtle distortions present in galaxy motions that we could see, showing unexplained gravitational pulls. But the structure

NASA has told crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to resume normal operations, ending a roughly two-hour period in which five astronauts sheltered inside a docked SpaceX capsule. The shelter order came Friday morning as a precautionary measure to protect crew while Russian cosmonauts attempted a fix on the Zvezda service module’s transfer tunnel