One of the biggest galaxies in the universe seems to lack its dark centerpiece.

Many cultures refer to the Pleiades as “seven sisters” and tell similar stories about them. Why? Researchers suggest an answer in the motion of the stars.

Scientists aren’t usually able to measure the size of gigantic planets, like Jupiter or Saturn, which are far from the stars they orbit. But a UC Riverside-led team has done it.

A planet in an unlikely orbit around a double star 336 light-years away may offer a clue to a mystery much closer to home: A hypothesized, distant body in our solar system dubbed "Planet Nine." This is the first time that astronomers have been able to measure the motion of a massive Jupiter-like planet that is orbiting very far away from its host stars and visible debris disk. This disk is similar to our Kuiper Belt of small, icy bodies beyond Neptune. In our own solar system, the suspected Planet Nine would also...

An enormous black hole keeps slipping through astronomers' nets. Supermassive black holes are thought to lurk at the hearts of most, if not all, galaxies. Our own Milky Way has one as massive as 4 million suns, for example, and M87's — the only black hole ever imaged directly — tips the scales at a whopping 2.4 billion solar masses.

What happened to all the lithium? The question has stumped astronomers for decades. While cosmologists have successfully predicted the abundance of the other light elements from the Big Bang, lithium has always come up short. Now, a team of astronomers may have found the reason: lithium-rich asteroids are smashing into white dwarves.

Jupiter and Saturn are due to converge in their orbits on Monday, appearing as a double planet in the night sky — the first such occurrence in almost 800 years. The two planets have been near one another throughout the year, according to Rice University astronomer Patrick Hartigan. They will reach their closest approach, passing within 0.1 degrees of each other during the winter solstice on December 21, the longest night of the year.

On December 3, humanity suddenly had information at its fingertips that people have wanted for, well, forever: the precise distances to the stars. “You type in the name of a star or its position, and in less than a second you will have the answer,” Barry Madore, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago and Carnegie Observatories, said on a Zoom call last week. “I mean …” He trailed off.

Thales Alenia Space, who have three sites in the UK and employ nearly 200 highly skilled engineers and scientists, have won the contract to design the mother ship for the Comet Interceptor mission, which will see one main spacecraft and two smaller robotic probes – built by the Japanese Space Agency – travel to an as-yet unidentified comet, and map it in three dimensions.

Did comets deliver the elements essential for life on Earth? It’s looking more and more like they could have. At least one comet might have, anyway: 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. A new study using data from the ESA’s Rosetta mission shows that the comet contains the life-critical element phosphorous.

NASA’s Voyager spacecraft may be billions of miles away and over 40 years old, but they’re still making significant discoveries, as new research reveals. A paper published today in the Astronomical Journal describes an entirely new form of electron burst, a discovery made possible by the intrepid Voyager probes.

The world's most productive astronomical facility releases its third big tranche of sky data.

The legendary Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico was destroyed this morning. Shortly before 8 a.m. local time, Arecibo’s 900-ton receiving platform collapsed, crashing down onto its 1000-foot-wide (305 meter) dish below.

Astronomers have discovered a cold brown dwarf – otherwise known as a “super planet” – for the first time using a radio telescope. Brown dwarfs are vast, sized between 15 and 75 times the mass of Jupiter, and have gaseous atmospheres similar to some of the planets in our solar system. They are also often known as “failed stars” because of the way that they shine.

Scientists have detected two bright radio bursts from a magnetar in our galaxy, as they get closer to discovering the source of the blasts. Earlier this month, scientists discovered that fast radio bursts were coming from the object, in a major breakthrough in the search for the source of those mysterious blasts of energy. It was the first time an FRB had been detected coming from inside our Milky Way, and also the first time such a blast had been traced back to a particular source.

Counting universes ought to be easy. By definition, you can stop at 1. Trouble is, definitions change. A century ago, the “universe” was defined as the Milky Way galaxy. Heretics who disagreed had long been ridiculed— until science staged what became known as the Great Debate, on April 26, 100 years ago. On that date, American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis articulated opposing views on the scope of the cosmos.

Astrophysicists consider that around 40% of the ordinary matter that makes up stars, planets and galaxies remains undetected, concealed in the form of a hot gas in the complexe cosmic web. Today, scientists at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (CNRS/Université Paris-Saclay) may have detected, for the first time, this hidden matter through an innovative statistical analysis of 20-year-old data. Their findings are published on November 6, 2020 in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

If you thought living on Earth in 2020 was comparable to hell, planet K2-141b is here to prove you wrong. On the scorching hot planet, hundreds of light-years away, oceans are made of molten lava, winds reach supersonic speeds and rain is made of rocks. Scientists have referred to the bizarre, hellish exoplanet as one of the most "extreme" ever discovered.

Our Milky Way galaxy abounds with potentially Earth-like planets, a new study suggests. On average, each sunlike star in the Milky Way likely harbors between 0.4 and 0.9 rocky planets in its "habitable zone," the just-right range of orbital distances where liquid water could be stable on a world's surface, researchers have found.

Scientists have discovered a lonely orphaned planet wandering through the Milky Way with no parent star to guide it — a "rogue" planet, stuck in endless darkness with no days, nights, or gravitational siblings to keep it company. It's possible our galaxy is filled to the brim with these rogue planets, but this one is particularly unusual for one special reason: it is the smallest found to date — even smaller than Earth — with a mass similar to Mars.