Astronomy News

The new animated film "Planet 51" boldly takes astronaut Capt. Chuck Baker where no one has gone before: to a life-harboring planet outside our solar system.

Look up into a clear night sky through a telescope and almost everything you see will be the result of nuclear processes.

Scientists have spent decades searching for the elusive material known as dark matter, which is believed to make up 25 percent of the universe.

Just in time for the holidays: a Hubble Space Telescope picture postcard of hundreds of brilliant blue stars wreathed by warm, glowing clouds.

The Yecheon Astro Space Center announced today that it has selected XCOR Aerospace as its preferred supplier of suborbital space launch services.

A NASA jumbo jet that will help scientists unlock the origins of the universe with infrared observations reached a milestone Friday when doors covering the plane's telescope were fully opened in flight.

Main Category: Swine Flu Also Included In: Infectious Diseases / Bacteria / Viruses Bacteria inhabited our planet for more than 4 billion years before humans showed up, and they'll probably outlive us by as many eons more.

According to planetary astronomer Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology , Earth and Titan share yet another feature, which is inextricably linked with that surface liquid: common fog.

An international team of physicists working in the bottom of an old iron mine in Minnesota said Thursday that they might have registered the first faint hints of a ghostly sea of subatomic particles known as dark matter long thought to permeate the cosmos.

This artist's conception shows a hypothetical gas giant planet with an Earth-like moon similar to the moon Pandora in the movie Avatar.

A California company developing a rocket plane for space tourism announced Thursday that it has an agreement with a nonprofit group in South Korea to conduct launches in that nation.

A new study of images from Chandra shows that the symmetry of the supernova remnants, or lack thereof, reveals how the star exploded.

GJ 1214ba 'a boiling, watery mass 42 light-years awaya 'resembles Earth more than any planet discovered outside our solar system, a team of astronomers reported Wednesday.

Gaia will be the most accurate optical astronomy satellite ever built so far. Due for launch in 2011, it will continuously scan the sky for at least five years from a point in space known as the second Lagrangian point , located at about 1.6 million kilometres away from the Earth, in the direction opposite to the Sun.

A team of Chinese astronomers have discovered a giant planet close to the exotic binary star system QS Virginis.

Bacteria inhabited our planet for more than 4 billion years before humans showed up, and they'll probably outlive us by as many eons more.

Herschel has peered inside an unseen stellar nursery and revealed surprising amounts of activity.

Picking up on yesterday's theme of planetary detections from ground-based observatories, we now get word of the detection of a transiting 'super-Earth' - one that may well have an atmosphere we can study - with the kind of equipment many amateurs already use to observe the sky.

Within a decade scientists could be able to detect the merger of tens of pairs of black holes every year, according to a team of astronomers at the University of Bonn's Argelander-Institut fuer Astronomie, who publish their findings in a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society .

In a speech given just a few weeks before he was lost at sea off the California coast in January 2007, Jim Gray, a database software pioneer and a Microsoft researcher, sketched out an argument that computing was fundamentally transforming the practice of science.