Space telescopes find trigger-happy star formationA new study from two of NASA's Great Observatories provides fresh insight into how some stars are born, along with a beautiful new image of a stellar nursery in our Milky Way galaxy.... — full story
Clouds discovered over Titan's tropicsIn a case of persistent interplanetary detective work using powerful ground-based telescopes, a team of astronomers located and tracked the first bright but transient clouds over tropical... — full story
Amateur astronomers across the UK are preparing to tweet the world's first mass participation meteor star party, as part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009). Led by... — full story
An international team of astronomers, led by Keiichi Ohnaka at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, has made the most high resolution images of a dying giant... — full story
Double engine for a nebulaThe new image, showing a very rich field of stars towards the Carina arm of the Milky Way, is centred on the star HD 87643, a member of the exotic class of B[e] stars. B[e] stars are... — full story
Scientists have debated how many mass extinction events in Earth's history were triggered by a space body crashing into the planet's surface. Most agree that an asteroid collision 65... — full story
Betelgeuse - the second brightest star in the constellation of Orion (the Hunter) - is a red supergiant, one of the biggest stars known, and almost 1000 times larger than our Sun. It... — full story
A team of astronomers has discovered a group of rare galaxies called the 'Green Peas' with the help of citizen scientists working through an online project called Galaxy Zoo. The finding... — full story
Even Albert Einstein might have been impressed. His theory of general relativity, which describes how the gravity of a massive object, such as a star, can curve space and time, has... — full story
Fermi finds gamma-ray galaxy surprisesBack in June 1991, just before the launch of NASA's Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory, astronomers knew of gamma rays from exactly one galaxy beyond our own. To their surprise and delight,... — full story