As we wrap up 2022, we'd like to celebrate a few of the cosmic “winners” discovered this year, at least while they still hold their titles.

You might be pretty confident that when a moon is there it’s there to stay, but that’s not always the case. Moons may have a history of disappearing.

Earth and the other seven planets in our solar system have only one star: the Sun. Years ago, astronomers found the first exoplanet that had two stars. They also found one with three stars. And four. Just how many stars can one planet...

Saturn's moons Janus and Epimetheus were once thought to be the same moon. It turns out they're dance partners.<br/>

There are a lot of weird exoplanets out there, like 55 Cancri e (aka Janssen), which is probably half covered in lava. But the half that's covered in lava might not be quite the half you're thinking of.<br/>

Humans have been hurling spacecraft at the Moon for over 60 years. But even with all that practice, it's still quite the challenge to successfully land something on the surface. Case in point: in August 2023, two missions attempted to...

At just four light years away, Proxima Centauri is our closest solar neighbor. The recent discovery of the new exoplanet Proxima D, has reopened the discussion of whether the proxima system is our best chance at reaching another Earth....

On our search for alien lifeforms we scan for primitive biosignatures, and wait and hope for their errant signals to happen by the Earth. But that may not be the best way. Any energy-hungry civilization more advanced than our own may...

Some funky orbits near the Kuiper Belt are hinting towards a brand new planet, the elusive ‘Planet X.’ Our friends Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin of Caltech are working hard to finally spot the potential gas giant through powerful...

Throughout the Pleistocene Epoch, the range of the woolly rhino grew and shrank in sync with global climate. So what caused the climate -- and the range of the woolly rhino -- to cycle back and forth between such extremes?

Earth has seasons, but what about the rest of the planets in the solar system? Let’s take a tour from Mercury to Pluto and see what seasons would be like on all our planetary neighbors. Bring a sweater!

On July 4th 2016, the Juno spacecraft entered orbit around the planet Jupiter after leaving earth five years ago. The Juno probe will tell us what lies inside the mysterious gas giant and with this information we’ll better understand the...

Since the 1950s, governments, companies, and researchers have been planting flags among the stars. But while it might seem like there's plenty of room in space, some pieces of celestial real estate are more valuable than others. As far...

In 1926, Robert Goddard launched Nell — the very first (successful) liquid fuel rocket. But Nell wasn't built like other modern rockets, including a notable lack of casing and an exhaust nozzle suspended above the propellant tanks.

Hunting for rogue planets is like hunting for an invisible needle in a haystack. But we're getting a much clearer view thanks to gravitational microlensing surveys. And it looks like there are a LOT more of them out there than we thought.

Saturn's rings are younger than Saturn, and the most spectacular sight in the Solar System is also disappearing. How do we know? By running our finger through some cosmic dust.

About 1.8–0.8 billion ago, the Earth went through a period known as the Boring Billion, where not a lot changed in terms of geology, evolution, or even the number of hours in a day. Some scientists call it “the dullest period in Earth’s...

After Pluto's demotion to dwarf planet in 2006, our solar system went from having nine planets to eight. But about a decade later, some astronomers proposed there was another planet, larger than Earth, hiding in the Kuiper Belt. And in...

This video is about the physics of geosynchronous and geostationary orbits, why they exist, when they don't, when they're useful for communication/satellite TV, etc.

This video covers the General theory of Relativity, developed by Albert Einstein, from basic simple levels (it's gravity, curved space) through to the concepts of how curved spacetime is represented by psuedo-Riemannian manifolds with...

Oxygen is crucial for life as we know it, but before it could build up in our atmosphere, earth had to slow down.

What do astronomers look for when they study exoplanets for signs of alien life? Hank explains how space telescopes are already yielding tantalizing clues of what other worlds might hold -- including water! -- and how the next generation...

In 1965, MIT's Lincoln Laboratory saw their Lincoln Calibration Sphere 1 (LCS-1) launched into Earth orbit. It was an empty aluminum sphere and couldn't do any science of its own. But the world's most boring disco ball has played a huge...

This week's SciShow news has Hank bringing us a primer on the science behind various illegal and illicit ways in which athletes "improve" their bodies, proof of general relativity that we can actually see, and a new way to measure how...