Space

Globular clusters are spherical collections of stars bound to each other by their mutual gravity. They are old, relics of the early years of the Universe, with ages of typically 12-13 billion years,…

Tau Ceti, one of the closest stars most like our Sun, may have five planets.  Tau Ceti is just 11.9 light years away and visible to our eyes in the evening sky. It is the closest single star…

Recently, more than 100 cosmologists, particle physicists and observational astrophysicists at least agreed that dark matter is important. Of course, you are not getting invited to a colloquium on…

The Hubble Space Telescope has detected seven primitive galaxies formed more than 13 billion years ago, and also a candidate, at redshift 11.9, for the record for the most distant galaxy found to…

A miniature extraterrestrial version of Africa's Nile River Valley has been spotted on Saturn’s moon Titan - it stretches more than 400 km from its "headwaters" to a large sea.   Have you ever…

In January of 2012, a new X-ray source flared and rapidly brightened in the Andromeda galaxy (M31), l2.5 million light-years from earth. The event was classified as an ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX…

Vega is a summer star in the Northern Hemisphere, visible toward the west at sunset. Vega is the brightest star in the constellation Lyra and, at only 25 light years away, quite close, cosmically…

In the constellation Taurus, astronomers have found the youngest still-forming solar system yet seen - an infant star called  L1527 IRS, surrounded by a swirling disk of dust and gas 450 light-…

The universe has always had some trace of heavy elements, such as carbon and oxygen, for as far back as astronomers could 'see'. These elements, originally churned from the explosion of massive stars…

The combined power of ESA's Herschel space observatory and the ground-based Keck telescopes mean hundreds of previously unseen starburst galaxies have been characterized, revealing extraordinary high…