Naming features on other worlds is a trickier issue than you might think.
A telescope pointed at the skies above Senegal to capture the stellar occultation.
François Colas, Observatoire de Paris, Insititut de Mécanique Celeste et de Calcul des Ephémérides
Trapped gas could be tainting the north pole of Pluto's moon Charon dark red.
New Horizons continues to help unravel the icy dwarf planet’s secrets.
NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
After last summer's Pluto flyby, the New Horizons spacecraft started sending data back to Earth – at 2 kilobits per second. Here's some of what scientists have learned so far from that rich, slow cache.
A highlight of 2015 was the number of weird and wonderful exoplanets that were found.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
New Year's resolutions are one thing. But what does it take to devote your life to a work goal with such a long time horizon you might never reach it in your lifetime?
In the long lead-up to our ultimate flyby of Pluto, space science has reconfigured our notions of what it means to be a solar system, a planet, a world.
What could be out there? That question eventually led to the discovery of Pluto.
ESO/L. Calçada
The existence of a "Planet X" in the outer solar system was the subject of great speculation, and was finally settled with the discovery of Pluto in 1930.
Music and astronomy have been intimately linked since antiquity.
AAP Image/ NASA
From Twinkle Twinkle to Space Odyssey and beyond, humans have always turned to music to help deal with the profoundly confronting enormity of the cosmos. Is that a match made in the heavens?
Pluto’s newly clear topography.
NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Scott Kenyon, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Photos from the spacecraft's close approach are dazzling. They and other data from the mission will fill in some of the blanks about Pluto and provide a snapshot of the infant solar system.
New Horizons mission members have worked on the project for even longer than it's taken the spacecraft to get to Pluto. They've planned, built and researched – and now their efforts are paying off.
Now the flypast of Pluto is over the space probe New Horizons will begin sending the data back to Earth. It will take many months but what will it reveal about the dwarf planet?