Space

Almost two years after the International Astronomical Union (IAU) General Assembly introduced the category of dwarf planets, the IAU, as promised, has decided on a name for transneptunian dwarf…

Brown dwarfs, "failed stars", are a class of objects that represent the missing link between the lowest-mass stars and the gas-giant planets, such as Jupiter and Saturn. Brown dwarfs are the faintest…

"The universe is a big place, and weird things can happen. I was flipping through archived Spitzer data of the object, and that's when I noticed it was surrounded by a ring we'd never seen before, "…

ESO's VLT has allowed astronomers to determine that WOH G64, a red supergiant star almost 2,000 times as large as our Sun located 163,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, weighs almost…

NASA's Phoenix spacecraft landed in the northern polar region of Mars Sunday to begin three months of examining a site chosen for its likelihood of having frozen water within reach of the lander's…

Two new exoplanets mean that the COROT mission(1) has now found a total of four new exoplanets in its 510 day journey. COROT started observations of its sixth star field at the beginning of May and…

Astronomers have seen the aftermath of spectacular stellar explosions known as supernovae before, but until now no one has witnessed a star dying in real time. While looking at another object in the…

On April 25, NASA’s Swift satellite picked up the brightest flare ever seen from a normal star other than our Sun. The flare, an explosive release of energy from a star, packed the power of thousands…

An obese oddball of a star has left astronomers wondering how it could have formed. Found with the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, the star is a pulsar – a compact, rapidly spinning star –…

Hydroxyl is made up of a hydrogen and oxygen atom each. It has been found on another planet for the first time - in the upper reaches of the atmosphere of Venus, some 100 km above the surface - by…