Astronomy

Astronomy

Pay Dirt: Cometary dust collector comes home

A capsule containing dust collected from the comet Wild-2 safely landed in the Utah desert.

Astronomy

Cosmic Push: Finding pieces of a dark puzzle

A controversial new study, the first to use gamma-ray bursts to measure the expansion of the universe far back in time, hints that dark energy may not be constant in time.

Astronomy

Images reveal possible origin of young stars

Astronomers say they have solved the riddle of how young, massive stars can reside so close to the monster black hole at the Milky Way's center.

Astronomy

Hubble spots North Star companion

Astronomers have obtained an image of a close companion star to Polaris, the North Star.

Astronomy

Gravity at play

Astronomers have found 19 cosmic mirages, distorted images created when the gravity of a massive galaxy bends and magnifies the light from a background object.

Astronomy

Outer Limits

A slew of recently discovered objects at the far reaches of the solar system, including a possible tenth planet, are providing scientists with clues about the origin and evolution of this distant region.

Astronomy

Gauging Star Birth: Spacecraft uses gamma rays as stellar tracer

Using radioactive material spewed into space by dying stars, astronomers have measured the star-formation rate in our galaxy over the past few million years.

Astronomy

A puny way to make planets

Brown dwarfs are failures in the star-making business, but new observations reveal that they may still succeed in growing planets.

Astronomy

Cosmic Expansion: Supernovas shed light on dark energy

A new study of light from supernovas provides additional hints that dark energy, the mysterious entity revving up the expansion of the universe, might be distributed uniformly throughout space and time.

Astronomy

Dark shadows

New radio telescope images of the center of the Milky Way make an even more compelling case that a supermassive black hole resides there.

Astronomy

Ring around the galaxy

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the largest number ever of elliptical galaxies with Einstein rings, a marker of gravitational lensing.

Astronomy

Images of a fiery youth

A faint, infrared glow captured by the Spitzer Space Telescope might be light from the universe's first stars.