Stories by Caleb A. Scharf

A sped-up video from the reusable SpaceX first stage as it comes in from space to land on a drone ship

Ancient structures possibly built by early hominids raise many of the same puzzles as our quest for life elsewhere does

A brief roundup of two intriguing pieces of recent research

Probably not, but pathogens that damage brains may earn a special place in cosmic hell

The answer lies in overcoming known and yet-to-be discovered hurdles—it'll be a wild ride

Safely landing a first-stage rocket on a ship opens up "cheap" orbital space, but also shows a path to Mars

A simple proposal for a way to pursue some answers to the origins of life

Five intriguing discoveries and recent news items 

A trip to the dentist leads to finding the first cosmic photographs of our planet

Astronomers exploit a remarkable supermassive black hole binary system to measure the primary black hole's spin

Guess what these images are and earn your stripes as a cosmic sightseer

The Hubble Space Telescope has used direct imaging to detect the spin of a hot, young gas-giant planet—a first for astronomy

Our species just stepped into a cosmic future, yet we still starve and fight each other

Two black holes merging can cast off a few percent of their total mass as gravitational waves in just minutes, sending the final object off on a high-speed journey through the universe

NASA knows, and it maintains active archives of these data. Here are maps for the positions of known natural objects in the inner, outer and distant solar system in January 2016

A cleverly stitched together set of imagery from Japanese weather satellite Himawari 8 creates a jaw-dropping HD time-lapse of a day-in-the-life of Earth—this is Glittering Blue

A new analysis of outer solar system orbits suggests that there really could be a hitherto unseen giant planet orbiting far from the sun—but what are the implications?

Newly released images from the Cassini mission's final close flyby of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus reveal further exquisite details of the surface terrain

We live on a spinning and orbiting world, but we don't usually think about our other, greater motions through the cosmos—maybe we should

Tis the season for science fiction fun, but could we even tell if the universe around us was filled with galactic empires and rebel forces?

From progress on deciphering the strange features of dwarf planet Ceres to NASA's plans to play with Martian sand and a heroic rescue of Japan's Venus-bound spacecraft, it's been an interesting past couple of weeks

A pair of scientific papers suggest that the ALMA observatory may have detected 2 new "planet-scale" objects associated with the outer realms of the solar system. But should we be awed or skeptical?

Remote sensing can produce spectacular, and wholly alien, views of our homeworld.

As the private space company Blue Origin achieves a 100 kilometer suborbital flight, and a spectacular re-landing of its rocket, it's worth pausing to consider the basic energy requirements of spaceflight from the surface of the Earth.