Astronomy News

Is there life on other planets? The Vatican has asked that age-old question over the past five days during a "study week" on astrobiology gathering leading scientists from around the world.

All we can say is, "Wow!" In celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, NASA's Great Observatories - the Hubble Space Telescope , the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory - have collaborated to produce an unprecedented image of the central region of our Milky Way galaxy .

The latest big screen offering from Sony Pictures, "2012," arrives in theatres on Friday , with a $200 million production about the end of the world supposedly based on theories backed by the Mayan calendar.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope captured this infrared image of a giant halo of very fine dust around the young star HR 8799, located 129 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus.

Now, astronomers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., find that an X-ray source in galaxy NGC 5408 represents one of the best cases for a middleweight black hole to date.

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding a conference on astrobiology, the study of life beyond Earth, with scientists and religious leaders gathering in Rome this week.

Vitaly Ginzburg, a Nobel Prize-winning Russian physicist and one of the fathers of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, died Sunday in Moscow.

The world is not coming to an end on December 21, 2012, the US space agency insisted Monday in a rare campaign to dispel widespread rumors fueled by the Internet and a new Hollywood movie.

Four years after its first solar sail ended up in the ocean instead of orbit, The Planetary Society announced Monday that by the end of 2010 it will try again to launch a spacecraft that will be propelled by the subtle pressure of sunlight.

PROFESSOR John C Brown, the 10th man since 1834 to hold the title Astronomer Royal for Scotland, is standing on the balcony outside his office on the top floor of Glasgow University's Kelvin Building.

More than a million Galileo moments, and counting! As the International Year of Astronomy draws to a close, Canadians are reporting a new appreciation for the beauty and mysteries of our universe.

A scene from Columbia Pictures' 2012. The action film will be released November 13, 2009.

The current golden age for gamma ray astronomy is creating more questions than answers.

The UW-Whitewater physics department is celebrating the International Year of Astronomy 2009 with a lecture series and exhibits.

Astronomers from The University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics have been heading out into the streets of Manchester to show passers-by close-up views of the Moon and the planet Jupiter.

Abstract Data volumes from multiple sky surveys have grown from gigabytes into terabytes during the past decade, and will grow from terabytes into tens of petabytes in the next decade.

What is the source of cosmic rays? Seems like an easy enough question. Cosmic rays are little subatomic particles zipping across the Universe.

A new type of supernova a ' the explosive death of a star a ' has been discovered in which helium detonates on the surface of a white dwarf star.

This is a composite of false color images of the galaxies found at the early epoch around 800 million years after the Big Bang.

A vast pool of molten rock in the continental crust that underlies southwestern Washington state could supply magma to three active volcanoes in the Cascade Mountains -- Mount St.