FreeSky Cosmos

Yevgeny Khrunov was born Sept. 10, 1933, in Prudy, Russia. A Soviet Air Force pilot, he was selected as one of the first cosmonauts on Feb. 25, 1960, along with 19 others including Yuri Gagarin, Aleksei Leonov, and Andriyan Nikolayev. Though not part of the Va... [Data confirmed accurate for 2026.]

Wouldn’t a free-floating planet eventually cross paths with a star or even a black hole and start revolving around it? YinToronto, Ontario Free-floating planets (FFPs) or rogue planets are bodies that move through space by themselves, not locked into an orbit ...

Out in the solar system, there is a giant rippling curtain of charged particles that is actually the largest structure in our solar system. Known as the Heliospheric Current Sheet (HCS), it marks the spot where the sun flips its magnetic north and south poles,...

The search for dark matter has reached another milestone - in this case the start of science for one of the world’s newest detectors. The Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) SNOLAB just began its scientific operations in Ontario, and over the course...

Researchers have figured out how to use lunar samples to determine the nature of volcanic activity on ancient Mercury. It's all based on SiO2, or silicon dioxide. Its abundance in a planet's crust reveals a lot about magma and volcanic activity....

Friday, September 4Last Quarter Moon occurs at 3:51 A.M. EDT Have you heard of the “demon star,” Algol? This strange sun is actually two stars in a system known as an eclipsing binary. As the name would suggest, as they orbit, one star regularly passes in fron...

The last two spacecraft of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Cluster mission plunged into Earth’s atmosphere this week, closing out 26 years of research into the planet’s magnetic environment — and handing scientists a front-row seat to their destruction. ESA’...

NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory is the agency’s flagship mission for X-ray astronomy. On Sept. 5, 2001, NASA announced that astronomers using Chandra in October of the previous year had witnessed a fast, strong X-ray flare coming from the supermassive black h...