6:13Video · Cosmic Impacts and Planetary Defense
StarPixels Studio
StarPixels on YouTube
Latest videos
6:13
10:09Video · Cosmic Impacts and Planetary Defense
The Asteroid That Made Earth’s Richest Gold Mine
Published October 13, 20263D print Galaxy M101 at home
Download the 3D-printable galaxy plate.
Credit: NASA
Featured story · Advice and News
Eyeballs on the Universe: Webb's Early Galaxy Problem Explained
Webb found galaxies in the early universe that shouldn't exist yet. Here's what the 'too many too early' problem means for cosmology.
Read the story →Reader favorites
Most Popular
The newest stories
Latest from StarPixels
Advice and News
Swift telescope on the verge of plunging back to Earth
The U.S. Space Force now predicts reentry on Wednesday, November 4, 2026.
Advice and News
Ten years of full moons, in full color
Marcella Giulia Pace's collection of apparent colors documents the full moon from different locations across Italy. A red- or yellow-colored moon usually sits near the horizon, where its light takes a long path through Earth's atmosphere and loses some blue to scattering.
Advice and News
Last good look at Hartley-IRAS until 2069
Comet 161P/Hartley-IRAS crosses the rich Milky Way north of Altair with a circular green coma, at 10th magnitude. The Moon-free window closes after November 14 and reopens November 27, the day it reaches perihelion.
Advice and News
TOI-561 b reflects three-quarters of its starlight
Webb watched TOI-561 b for 37 hours, covering nearly four orbits, and found evidence of a substantial global atmosphere on a world once thought too extreme to hold one. Climate models suggest silicate clouds on its dayside act as sunscreen, keeping the planet cooler than a bare rock this close to its star.
Advice and News
Slow stellar collisions built early supermassive black holes
Slow stellar collisions in UCLA's simulations merged stars in ultra-dense early clusters into one star as massive as its whole cluster. When that star reached the end of its life, it collapsed into a massive black hole, a seed for the supermassive black holes that formed shortly after the Big Bang.
Advice and News
Mars and Jupiter meet in close approach November 16
Mars and Jupiter draw closer together each night before their close approach on November 16. Through much of the second half of the month, Mercury and Venus join them, forming a mini planet parade in the early morning sky.
Advice and News
Aurora dances over Iceland's steaming fumaroles
Stéphane Vetter's Halloween photograph captures ghostly towers of steam venting from fumaroles at Hverir in northeastern Iceland beneath green northern lights. Solar activity triggered the geomagnetic storms that sent energetic particles into Earth's upper atmosphere to create the display.
Advice and News
3I/ATLAS may contain 10-billion-year-old material
Webb's measurements put the deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio in 3I/ATLAS's methane 13 times higher than comet 67P's, higher than any measured in the Solar System. The researchers read that excess as ice formed in a cold, low-metallicity environment under a high rate of cosmic-ray irradiation.
Explore by topic