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NASA's Dawn mission revealed that the dwarf planet Ceres may have--or may once have had--an ocean. Now, new research provides evidence that the world might also hold the right stuff [...]

Just a few years ago, astronomers witnessed something strange happening in a galaxy 848 million light-years away. The supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of this galaxy was chug [...]

A seemingly ordinary galaxy has put on an extraordinary spectacle. About 300 million light-years away, the supermassive black hole in the galaxy SDSS1335+0728 suddenly came to life. A June 18 [...]

THE COSMIC GEMS ARC is a galaxy that can only be seen through gravitational lensing, as an extremely dense foreground object bends and focuses the incoming light of a more [...]

A NEW ANALYSIS OF RADAR IMAGES taken by NASA's Magellan mission to Venus in the early 1990s has revealed indications of lava flows reshaping the planet's surface, according to a [...]

Since its launch, astronomers have been using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to peer back to a time when the first stars and galaxies were forming. Not only is [...]

ON FEB. 23,1987, astronomers had an incredible front-row seat to a once-in-a-lifetime cosmic event: Just 168,000 light-years away, a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud collapsed in on itself and [...]

The distant dwarf planet Eris is nearly the same size as Pluto and occupies the same frozen region of our outer solar system, called the Kuiper Belt. It's so distant [...]

The Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33) in Orion is an iconic target for backyard astrophotographers--and it was one of the first scientific targets for the European Space Agency's Euclid mission, which [...]

DRIVE OUT TO THE COUNTRY on a clear summer night and find the darkest place you can. Find the constellations Scorpius and Sagittarius, and look for dark regions amid the [...]

OUR GALAXY IS LOUSY WITH PLANETS. NASA's exoplanet archive lists more than 3,400 confirmed planets outside our solar system, with more added every day. Nearly 4,500 planetary candidates from NASA's [...]

JANUARY 25, 2004, marked the start of a 90-day planned mission for NASA's six-wheeled, golf cart-sized Opportunity rover--one of two vehicles comprising the Mars Exploration Rover mission. Fifteen years later--eight [...]

Aliens are serious science. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, constitutes major research projects at radio telescopes the world over, and it is championed by the non-profit institute that [...]

Our galaxy is lousy with planets. NASA's exoplanet archive lists more than 3,400 confirmed planets outside our solar system, with more added every day. Nearly 4,500 planetary candidates from NASA's [...]

Late this year--or, more likely, early next--a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch a spacecraft to an orbit 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) high, three times the distance of geosynchronous orbit. [...]

The astronomers of Lowell Observatory were on a mission in 1930, driven by founder Percival Lowell to find a hypothesized ninth planet (dubbed 'Planet X') that would explain strange orbital [...]

By 1974, the United States and the Soviet Union had thrown some two dozen missions at Mars, with only a few sticking. The Mariner 4 flyby in 1964 revealed Mars--Earth's [...]

By 1995, astronomers had detected only one planet around a Sun-like star. Today, we have discovered more than 4,000 extrasolar planets. Of those, only about 50 are considered habitable by [...]

The article reports that NASA's exoplanet archive contains more than 3,400 confirmed planets outside the solar system. It notes that the history of claims of planets outside the solar system stretches back more than a century and involves outsized personalities, outright fraudsters, befuddled scientists, and brown dwarfs.

After some 15 prolific years on the martian surface, NASA's Opportunity rover has gone silent. It took a whopping planet-wide dust storm to fell the solar-powered robot, but, in February, [...]

AFTER SOME 15 PROLIFIC YEARS on the martian surface, NASA's Mars Opportunity rover has gone silent. We talked to the NASA engineers and scientists whose lives have been touched by [...]

NASA's Jupiter orbiter, Juno, which arrived at our solar system's largest planet in July, has now been given new mission parameters: to stay in its 53-day orbit instead of burning [...]

TRAPPIST-1 has a solar system like no other. The tiny red dwarf is barely big enough to be considered a star, and its radius is just a hair larger than [...]

A signal from the center of the Andromeda Galaxy points to the existence of dark matter there. The gamma-ray emissions seem to come from several point sources in a tight [...]

The International Astronomical Union has accepted the New Horizons team's proposal on naming conventions for surface features in the Pluto system. Themes for Pluto surface names include mythological underworld deities, [...]

The planet HAT-P-2b orbits an F-type star slightly larger than the Sun. Eight times the mass of Jupiter, the planet orbits its sun in just over five days. As it [...]

Piers Sellers, meteorologist, NASA astronaut, and deputy director of the Earth Science Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, died December 23. He was 61. Sellers began working at NASA/GSFC [...]

Hubble has its iconic deep field filled to the brim with galaxies. Now the Chandra X-ray Observatory has one, too, peering at ancient galaxies and their massive black holes in [...]

At the center of the Milky Way lies Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), a supermassive black hole. Stellar tidal disruption events, during which stars are torn apart as they approach Sgr [...]

JAXA's Venus probe, Akatsuki, discovered something spectacular: a 6,200-mile (10,000 kilometers) structure in Venus' upper atmosphere. The entire bow-shaped wave stretched pole-to-pole and lasted about four days. The leading hypothesis [...]

PILE UP. Most astronomers think the Moon was formed from a primordial planet called Theia smashing into Earth and kicking up molten material that coalesced into the Moon. No one [...]

Conditions on Earth may have been ripe for life at two separate times. Selenium deposits in soil suggest a 1-billion-year gap between the first and second period, when life finally [...]

This January, the Keck Observatory was outfitted with the 5-ton Keck Cosmic Web Imager, which is tasked with mapping the 'cosmic web' that binds galaxies [...]

In the quest for the Google Lunar XPrize, the Moon Express team has raised enough private funding to afford its trip to the [...]

Researchers determining the mass, including dark matter, of the Milky Way are narrowing in on a number between 4.0 x 1011 and 5.8 x 1011 solar [...]

49 Librae, a star once thought to be 2.3 billion years old, is actually 12 billion years old. 49 Lib siphoned gases off a dying companion, which made it appear [...]

HD 172555, a 23 million-year-old star, shows evidence of vaporized comets. Their paths indicate the presence of a yet-unseen giant [...]

Research of meteorite dust falling to Earth over time reveals that much of it likely came from a single asteroid impact 466 million years [...]