Night Sky Simulator
Visit our Night Sky Simulator to see what stars, constellations, planets and deep-sky objects are visible in the night sky at your location.
Astronomy News
The starparty.com news feed on astronomy, cosmology, astrophysics and space exploration
Is the Expansion of the Universe Slowing? (11/8/2025) - New evidence suggesting the expansion of the Universe is slowing down has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, in November 2025. The new evidence, although unconfirmed, adds weight to the findings from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), near Tucson Arizona, published earlier this year, which also questioned established wisdom about … Continue reading Is the Expansion of the Universe Slowing? 
China Collects Rock Samples From Moon’s Far Side (12/1/2024) - The Chang’e 6 mission of the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) has successfully returned the first ever rock and soil samples taken from the farside of the Moon. The samples are similar to those obtained from the nearside by the Apollo missions back in the 1960s, and other subsequent sample-collection missions. This adds weight to … Continue reading China Collects Rock Samples From Moon’s Far Side 
First Images from JWST Released (7/16/2022) - The first full-colour images from the newly commissioned James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) were released on 12 July 2022, providing the deepest ever infrared views of distant galaxies, stunning portraits of the Southern Ring Nebula, Stephan’s Quintet of galaxies and the Carina Nebula, as well as spectographic observations of the exoplanet WASP-96 b, revealing the … Continue reading First Images from JWST Released 
Evidence of New Fundamental Force (4/10/2021) - The ‘Muon g-2’ experiment conducted at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (also known as Fermilab) in the United States has provided strong evidence for the existence of a new fundamental force of nature. We currently know of four fundamental forces, the strong and weak nuclear forces, the electromagnetic force and the force of gravity. This … Continue reading Evidence of New Fundamental Force 
First Image of a Black Hole (4/20/2019) - A global network of radio telescopes known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has produced the first ever image of the silhouette of a black hole. The image shows hot luminous gas surrounding the black hole’s event horizon – the sphere beyond which light cannot escape the black hole’s gravitational influence. The team responsible has … Continue reading First Image of a Black Hole 
Cliffs of Ice Found on Mars (1/12/2018) - Water ice deposits have been found in cliff-like structures known as ‘scarps’ at eight different sites on Mars, using the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It has previously been shown that there is shallow ground ice under roughly a third of the Martian surface, detected with spectrometers and ground-penetrating radar from orbiting spacecraft. … Continue reading Cliffs of Ice Found on Mars 
Interstellar Object Discovered in Our Own Solar System (1/7/2018) - On 19 October 2017, an astronomer at the Haleakala Observatory, Hawaii, spotted an object passing through our solar system on an unusual hyperbolic trajectory. The strange cigar-like shape of the object lead some to speculate that it could be the product of an extraterrestrial civilization.
Seven Earth-Like Planets Found Orbiting TRAPPIST-1 (2/24/2017) - On 22 February 2017, astronomers announced that the faint Jupiter-sized ultra-cool red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, in the constellation of Aquarius, is host to seven Earth-sized planets, all of which are within the stars’ ‘habitable zone’, where it is possible that liquid water could be present. The exoplanets have not yet been imaged directly but were … Continue reading Seven Earth-Like Planets Found Orbiting TRAPPIST-1 
Moon discovered orbiting dwarf planet Makemake (4/27/2016) - The dwarf planet Makemake (pronounced Mah-kay Mah-kay), in the Kuiper Belt, has been shown by the Hubble Space Telescope to possess a moon.
Neutrino source pinpointed for first time (4/27/2016) - The IceCube neutrino telescope in Antarctica, the Fermi gamma ray telescope in low earth orbit and an array of radio telescopes across the Southern Hemisphere, have been used collaboratively to pinpoint a neutrino source in deep space for the first time.
