The Handmaid's Tale

A mysterious ninth planet lurks in the outer reaches of our solar system and it’s a giant -- ten times the mass of the Earth, in fact! Astronomers are yet to capture an image of this mysterious world but they can speculate what it might be like. Now we're digging in to find out if it's a volcanic super-Earth, an icy mega-Pluto or a gaseous giant like Neptune.

Supermassive black holes can devour stars and can even shape galaxies. We're now studying recent black hole collisions and examine how these gigantic black holes get so large.

The New Horizons probe sped past the dwarf planet Pluto in 2015 and captured the first-ever closeup images of the mysterious world. While scientists expected the planet to be gray and heavily cratered, they were surprised to find mountain ranges, active glaciers and an atmosphere streaked with organic chemistry. The geologically alive planet has many secrets hiding below, too -- a warm internal ocean of liquid water that could nurture life nearly four-billion miles from the sun.

We've all heard of the Death Star but the universe has its own gallery of killer stars worthy of any sci-fi film. From assassin supernovas that vaporize planets and sterilize entire regions of the galaxy to vampire stars that drain the life force from their neighbors, we're counting down NASA's top six most-wanted stars.

The universe is a dangerous place so we've recruited a spaceship full of crash test dummies to explore the most deadly hot spots in the cosmos. Our test subject Chuck is on a mission to reveal the most violent and energetic phenomenon in the universe in what will be the ultimate guide to a millions ways to die in space.

Scientists believe that the building blocks for life are found throughout the solar system and that Mars has harbored life many times. Martian life could have emerged before life on Earth, even, but technological innovations are revealing the violence and catastrophic events these Martians endured. Through these events, Mars has been changed from a blue watery world to a dusty red planet, yet life continues to bounce back.

Dark matter is the biggest mystery of the cosmos. Scientists know that it has been vital to our universe since its birth, and new discoveries reveal that it could create black holes, cause mass extinctions and might even shape life on Earth itself.

Astronomers have discovered strange new planets that amaze the world of science over and over again. These new planets could not be more different from our own planet. We're digging in to learn if we'll ever find another planet like Earth or if these distant worlds are merely stranger than fiction.