Space

Scientists have known for more than a decade that galaxies in the early universe produced many more stars than galaxies today. But what has remained unknown is why. Now, researchers writing in a…

The highest jump ever made was by Joseph Kittinger in 1960--31 km. This year, astronaut Felix Baumgartner will attempt a 36 km jump, and there is talk about Michael Fournier attempting a 40 km jump.…

It takes Saturn almost thirty years to orbit the Sun, with the opportunity to image both of its poles occurring only twice in that period. 2009 brought a unique chance for Hubble to image Saturn with…

Every galaxy we know about has a collection of black holes that can each be up to 10 times the sun’s mass. In addition to these black holes, there is one to rule them all; a supermassive black hole…

Yesterday a press release about a new interstellar medium map that has been published (PDF) in Astronomy and Astrophysics caught my eye. A French-American team of astronomers, combining…

The Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), the latest addition to ESO's Paranal Observatory (eso0949), has captured a dramatic new image of the Orion Nebula. The New telescope…

For the first time, a team of astronomers has completed a demographic census of galaxy types at two different points in the Universe's history — in effect, creating two Hubble sequences — that help…

The starburst region NGC 3603 is a cosmic factory where stars form frantically from the nebula's extended clouds of gas and dust. Located 22 000 light-years away from the Sun, it is the closest…

Astronomers have discovered another black hole with a mass over fifteen times that of the Sun, one of only three such objects found so far. The newly announced black hole lies in a spiral galaxy…

Take 2 minutes with Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield and you too will know how to pee in space.  And the origins of shooting stars.   He starts with "when you go to the bathroom on…