Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to study some of the oldest and faintest stars in the globular cluster NGC 6752 have made an unexpected finding. They discovered a dwarf galaxy in our cosmic backyard, only 30 million...
A clever use of non-science engineering data from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has let a team of researchers, including an Arizona State University graduate student, measure the density of rock layers in 96-mile-wide Gale Crater.
The findings, to be published...
For over a century and a half, Eta Carinae has been one of the most luminous – and most enigmatic – stars of the southern Milky Way.
Part of its nature was revealed in 1847, when, in a giant eruption,...
Investigating the history of our cosmos with a large sample of distant 'active' galaxies observed by ESA's XMM-Newton, a team of astronomers found there might be more to the early expansion of the universe than predicted by the standard...
For the first time ever, astronomers have detected a 1.3 km radius body at the edge of the solar system. Kilometer-sized bodies like the one discovered have been predicted to exist for more than 70 years. These objects acted...
For many years, scientists assumed the aurora seen around the north pole was identical to the aurora seen around the south pole. The poles are connected by magnetic field lines and auroral displays are caused by charged particles streaming...
In findings published overnight in science journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, a sample collected during the 1971 Apollo 14 lunar mission was found to contain traces of minerals with a chemical composition common to Earth and very unusual...
The light released from around the first massive black holes in the universe is so intense that it is able to reach telescopes across the entire expanse of the universe. Incredibly, the light from the most distant black holes...
Most of Earth's essential elements for life—including most of the carbon and nitrogen in you—probably came from another planet.
Earth most likely received the bulk of its carbon, nitrogen and other life-essential volatile elements from the planetary collision that created...
Almost 20 years ago, the DAMA/LIBRA experiment at Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory—LNGS began publishing data showing that it had detected a signal modulation produced by an interaction with the Milky Way's dark matter halo.
Dark matter is believed to...
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...
