Space

An unusual hexagonal shape surrounding Saturn's north pole was spotted on the planet for the first time thirty years ago and nothing similar, with such a regular geometry, has been found on any other…

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey  - BOSS - is the largest component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) and pioneered the use of quasars to map density variations in…

Evidence collected over a period of 16 years by NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, a satellite in low-earth orbit equipped with instruments that measured variations in X-ray sources, has led to a…

The universe is big - really big. Just our Milky Way galaxy alone is about 300 billion stars, with planets whizzing around them and clouds of gas and dust floating in between. Then there is our…

A new study of gamma-ray light may lead to evidence of dark matter, a hypothetical blanket term for whatever must make up most of the material universe. Using publicly available data from NASA's…

Right now a doomed gas cloud is edging ever closer to the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. These black holes feed on gas and dust all the time, but astronomers rarely…

In 2005, NASA's Cassini spacecraft sent pictures back to Earth depicting an icy Saturnian moon spewing water vapor and ice from fractures, known as "tiger stripes," in its frozen surface. It was big…

The centimeter-sized fragments and smaller particles that make up the regolith — the layer of loose, unconsolidated rock and dust — of small asteroids is formed by temperature cycling that breaks…

The amount of water present in the moon may have been overestimated by scientists studying the mineral apatite, according to a new computer model created to accurately predict how apatite would have…

Exploding stars, random impacts involving comets and meteorites, and even near misses between two bodies can create regions of great heat and high pressure and researchers have developed a method for…