Black holes are not cosmic vacuum cleaners, as some people claim. Nor are they space drains where everything simply disappears. So, what are they? What happens to things that get too close to them? The answers cannot be squeezed into the few seconds of a short social media video.

On the night of Thursday, August 27, we will witness a nearly total lunar eclipse, during which the Moon may take on reddish hues—a phenomenon popularly known as a "blood Moon."

Very young stars lurk unseen in clouds of gas and dust in space, where they were born. In the direction of the Orion constellation, there is a vast cloud complex crucial for truly understanding the life and death of stars.