Space

The space shuttle Endeavour and its seven-member crew lifted off at 6:36 p.m. EDT Wednesday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The astronauts are on their way to the International Space…

The new planet was identified by astronomers looking for transiting planets – that is, planets that pass in front of their home star – using a network of small automated telescopes in Arizona,…

On the night of 21 July, ESO astronomer Yuri Beletsky took images of the night sky above Paranal, the 2600m high mountain in the Chilean Atacama Desert home to ESO's Very Large Telescope. The amazing…

Every 62 million years there is a mass extinction on Earth. No one is sure why but, since the solar motion through the Milky Way has been computed for the past 600 million years, we know it is too…

Stars don’t shine forever. How long a star lives depends on how big and heavy it is. The bigger the star, the shorter its life. When a star significantly heavier than our sun runs out of fuel, it…

You’d think that astronomers would have found all the different classes of active galaxy nuclieu (AGN ) - after all, AGN such as quasars, blazars, and Seyfert galaxies are among the most luminous…

‘Killer’ electrons are highly energetic, negatively charged particles found in near-Earth space. They can critically, and even permanently, damage satellites in orbit, including telecommunication…

In just over a week's time NASA's Phoenix Lander is due to launch for Mars where it will probe the arctic landscape searching for conditions favourable for past or present life. UK scientists from…

Supermassive black holes have been discovered to grow more rapidly in young galaxy clusters, according to new results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. These "fast-track" supermassive black…

Astronomers have found a debris disk around HD 15115. As seen from Earth, the edge-on disk resembles a needle sticking out from the star. Astronomers think the disk's odd imbalanced look is caused by…