Just as astronomers thought they were making sense of fast radio bursts (FRBs) — the mysterious repeating signals originating deep in space — the universe threw us a curveball.

For over 50 years, humans have tried to pull back the thick clouds of Venus to study its surface. Most observations have tapped the long wavelengths of radar to pierce the cloud layers. Now, scientists have combined long-term radar observations of the planet’s surface to try to clarify a longstanding mystery behind the length of Venus' day.

Scientists generally agree that the best strategy for finding extraterrestrial life is to look for a world that has conditions similar to Earth’s, including atmospheric oxygen that could be produced by organisms running photosynthesis. But current instruments used to study potentially habitable exoplanets are woefully ill equipped to find such biosignatures.

NASA's planet-hunting mission TESS has found its first potentially habitable exoplanet the size of Earth orbiting a star about 100 light-years from Earth, according to the agency. The findings were announced during the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Monday in Honolulu.

The discovery of terrestrial exoplanets, planets that orbit stars outside the solar system, has been one of the most significant developments in modern astronomy. Several exoplanets lie in the “habitable zones” of stars, where planets are thought to be able to maintain liquid water on their surface, and have the potential to host life.

Astronomers gazing into the heart of the Milky Way have discovered new clues about our galaxy's dramatic past.

A team of astronomers have mapped the Milky Way's magnetic field using 137 pulsars in the northern sky. And they're not done yet.

Astronomers have discovered a vast structure in our galaxy, made up of many interconnected "nurseries" where stars are born. The long, thin filament of gas is a whopping 9,000 light-years long and 400 light-years wide. It lies around 500 light-years from our Sun, which is relatively close by in astronomical distances.

Everything we think we know about the shape of the universe could be wrong. Instead of being flat like a bedsheet, our universe may be curved, like a massive, inflated balloon, according to a new study. That's the upshot of a new paper published today (Nov. 4) in the journal Nature Astronomy, which looks at data from the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the faint echo of the Big Bang.

A few months ago a group of NASA exoplanet astronomers, who are in the business of discovering planets around other stars, called me into a secret meeting to tell me about a planet that had captured their interest. Because my expertise lies in modeling the climate of exoplanets, they asked me to figure out whether this new planet was habitable – a place where liquid water might exist.

A flagship observatory that will map the heavens in spectacular detail and search the skies for asteroids on a collision course with Earth faces serious disruption from a new wave of satellites bound for space, the Guardian has learned.

A mission to launch thousands of satellites is about to begin, but scientists say this could affect astronomy.

If there’s one star in the sky people know about, it’s Betelgeuse.* Marking the right shoulder of the hunter Orion—remember, he’s facing us, so it’s on our left—this orange-red star is one of the brightest in the night sky. It’s been studied for as long as we’ve had telescopes, yet for all our advanced technology and knowhow, details about it are maddeningly vague. We don’t even have a good determination of how far away it is!

Strange blasts from space called fast radio bursts continue to puzzle astronomers with their odd behaviour, as they seem to come from a variety of galaxies

The Moon moves eastward relative to the background stars an average of 13° every day, and early tomorrow morning (Friday, March 29), Earth’s only satellite will pass within just 3° of Saturn. The ringed planet rises around 3:15 a.m. local daylight time over the southeastern horizon. The Moon, which currently appears as a waning crescent, follows about 10 minutes later.

A network of eight radio telescopes around the world helped to record the image

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS), the Georg August University of Göttingen, and the Sonneberg Observatory have discovered 18 Earth-sized planets beyond the solar system. The worlds are so small that previous surveys had overlooked them. One of them is one of the smallest known so far; another one could offer conditions friendly to life. The researchers re-analyzed a part of the data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope with a new and more sensitive method that they developed.

Our solar system has several belts of rocky planetesimals that are essentially the crumbs left over from the formation of the planets and moons. But new research suggests some of these objects could actually be alien, captured during close flybys with other star systems. These close encounters could also explain objects like 'Oumuamua and might even provide an alternative to the "Planet Nine" hypothesis.

After successfully testing its ability to withstand extreme temperature swings and the vacuum of space, the James Webb Space Telescope is now one step closer to its planned launch in 2021.

Astronomers captured a first look at radiation emitted directly by Uranus’ rings. Scientists have known for a few decades that the planet has faint rings, but there’s a whole lot that remains mysterious about them—the rings’ composition and mass, and the sizes of their individual pieces. Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom used two telescopes in Chile to measure radiation from the pieces that comprise Uranus’ rings, the first observations of the rings in radio and mid-infrared wavelengths.