A "cold Neptune" and two potentially habitable worlds are part of a cache of five newly discovered exoplanets and eight exoplanet candidates found orbiting nearby red dwarf stars, which are reported in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series by a team led...
Plumes of water vapor that may be venting into space from Jupiter's moon Europa could come from within the icy crust itself, according to new research. A model outlines a process for brine, or salt-enriched water, moving around within...
The outskirts of the Milky Way are home to the galaxy's oldest stars. But astronomers have spotted something unexpected in this celestial retirement community: a flock of young stars.
More surprising still, spectral analysis suggests that the infant stars have an extragalactic...
The historic first detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes far outside our galaxy opened a new window to understanding the universe. A string of detections—four more binary black holes and a pair of neutron stars—soon followed the...
The afterglow from the distant neutron-star merger detected last August has continued to brighten - much to the surprise of astrophysicists studying the aftermath of the massive collision that took place about 138 million light years away and sent gravitational waves...
A bright disruption in Saturn's narrow F ring suggests it may have been disturbed recently. This feature was mostly likely not caused by Pandora (50 miles or 81 kilometers across) which lurks nearby, at lower right. More likely, it...
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have observed an unexpected thin disc of material encircling a supermassive black hole at the heart of the spiral galaxy NGC 3147, located 130 million light-years away.
The presence of the black hole...
Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope document the formation of a Great Dark Spot on Neptune for the first time, report researchers in a new study.
Like Jupiter's Great Red Spot, Neptune's Great Dark Spots are storms that form...
Theoreticians in two fields defied the received wisdom that planets only orbit stars like the sun. They proposed the possibility of thousands of planets around a supermassive black hole.
"With the right conditions, planets could be formed even in harsh environments, such as...
The question of how quickly the universe is expanding has been bugging astronomers for almost a century. Different studies keep coming up with different answers—which has some researchers wondering if they've overlooked a key mechanism in the machinery that...
New research led by astrophysicists at Durham University, UK, predicts that the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) could hit the Milky Way in two billion years' time.
The collision could occur much earlier than the predicted impact between the Milky Way...
