Space

The Martian volcano Olympus Mons is about three times the height of Mount Everest but it's the small details that Rice University professors Patrick McGovern and Julia Morgan are looking at in…

An Algol type star system is an eclipsing spectroscopic binary consisting of two close, interacting stars. Their X-ray emission is due to slow mass transfer due to Roche lobe overflow. Algol-type…

A new Hubble image shows three galaxies locked in a gravitational tug-of-war that may result in the eventual demise of one of them. About 100 million light-years away, in the constellation of Piscis…

Astronomers using a telescope aboard the NASA Swift Satellite have captured information from the early stages of a gamma ray burst - the most violent and luminous explosions occurring in the Universe…

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have gained new insights about the atmosphere of Pluto - (it's a dwarf now, get over it.) What stands out?   Large amounts of methane in the…

Astronomy as a profession is hyper-specialized.  What do you study-- planets, stars, galaxies, clusters, cosmology? Oh, if only it were that simple.  Say you study stars.  It doesn't…

I have read many works about black holes and one thing is possible to say for sure: nobody knows what really happens inside a black hole. There is a lot of theories about that. But they don’t have…

Interstellar space dust from a dead star identified by a research team led by The University of Nottingham could unlock some of the mysteries of the early universe. Dr Loretta Dunne and her team have…

A deep new image of the magnificent Helix planetary nebula has been obtained using the Wide Field Imager at ESO's La Silla Observatory. The image shows a rich background of distant galaxies, usually…

Sadly, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) had a launch failure, and is now spread out on Antarctica somewhere. Ironically, I'd written earlier today about the economics of the New Horizons mission…