The Rosetta orbiter makes its second swing past a relic of the early solar system.

Astronomers from the United Kingdom have published papers criticizing some of the evidence used to support theories of dark matter and energy.

Climate experts turn their gaze north to monitor this summer's Arctic melt.

If the object that crashed into Jupiter on June 3 left behind a bruise, it’s a tiny one. No ground-based telescope has found evidence of a scar. But an image taken June 6 with the sharp eye of the Hubble Space Telescope may provide the final say.  Researchers haven’t yet had a chance to get their hands on the Hubble data, says planetary scientist Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. “Until we get that back, it will not be clear whether we have an impact that left a [scar], or a meteor which did not.”  With observations planned months in advance, “...

Astronomers at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Miami presented images of exoplanets in high-angle orbits.

Physicists are embroiled in a verbal slugfest over a few measly WIMPs.WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles, are hypothetical subatomic particles that, if shown to exist, might account for some of the invisible dark matter that astronomers say makes up some 85 percent of the mass of the universe. Astronomers are eager to find dark matter, because it would help them understand the unseen gravitational glue that keeps galaxies and galaxy clusters from flying apart. And a WIMP version of dark matter in particular would thrill many physicists, because it would validate a theory called su...

For the fourth year in a row, about a third of honey bee hives in the United States have died off during the winter. That’s an estimate of the proportion of managed colonies killed by all sorts of mishaps, from diseases and the dreaded Varroa mite, not to mention bad weather and just plain bad luck. The estimate comes from a preliminary release of data from phone and online surveys by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As to what happened to honey bees last winter, beekeepers reported that bad weather played an unusually large role compared with previ...