This doomed alien planet has a year that lasts just 16 hours — it’s only getting faster

The newly announced exoplanet belongs to a category scientists refer to as “hot Jupiters.” These worlds are built more or less like our solar system’s behemoth, but orbit much closer to their stars, hence the nickname. Although astronomers have identified more than 400 hot Jupiters to date, researchers say none are quite like the new discovery, which is designated TOI-2109b.

This hot ‘stream’ of star gas will collide with our galaxy sooner than we thought

The Milky Way is playing a violent game of tug-of-war with its two toughest neighbors — the rowdy sibling dwarf galaxies known as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. It’s hardly a fair contest. With a combined heft of about 17 billion solar masses (nearly 100 times scrawnier than the Milky Way), the two dwarf galaxies are slowly being torn apart by the gravity of our galaxy, and by each other. 

Could humanity send astronauts to Alpha Centauri like in ‘Lost in Space’?

Will humans ever find themselves at home at Alpha Centauri?  With life on Earth facing increasing challenges as humans battle against massive problems like climate change and its ever-worsening consequences, people often wonder if humanity could possibly live on another planet. In the show “Lost in Space,” which got a 2018 revival on Netflix after its original iteration in the 1960s, the Space Family Robinson family pursues doing exactly that. The show sees the family journeying out to a planet in Alpha Centauri, the closest solar system to our own.

International Space Station shines in gorgeous fly-around photos by Crew Dragon astronauts

On Nov. 8, the Crew Dragon capsule Endeavour, carrying the four astronauts of SpaceX’s Crew-2 mission, departed the orbiting lab after a 6.5-month stay. Endeavour didn’t head directly home to Earth, however; it first performed a complete, 360-degree fly-around of the ISS, a maneuver not performed by a crewed spacecraft since NASA’s space shuttle fleet retired in 2011.

Private habitats, not just the International Space Station, may be needed to get astronauts to Mars: report

NASA aims to put astronauts on the moon in this decade and on the Red Planet in the 2030s. To help make these ambitious goals a reality, the agency is performing lots of research aboard the International Space Station (ISS) — monitoring astronaut health, behavior and performance on year-long orbital missions, for example, to better understand the effects of long-duration spaceflight on the human body and mind.