A dramatic triplet of galaxies takes centre stage in this latest Picture of the Week from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, which captures a three-way gravitational tug-of-war between interacting galaxies. This system —known as Arp 195— is featured in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, a list which showcases some of the weirder and more wonderful galaxies in the universe.

Now might be the time to wipe the dust off that pair of binoculars and extract the family telescope from the back of the closet: Saturn is about to put on its best and brightest show, looking spiffier than at any time during the year – a performance that will be followed a few weeks later by Jupiter.

Astronomers have captured the first-ever spin measurements of planets making up the HR 8799 star system.

A team of scientists will embark on a new international research project led by Harvard University to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life by looking for advanced technology it may leave behind.

Humanity's return to the moon could open up new windows on the universe. NASA is working to establish a permanent human presence on and around the moon by the end of the 2020s, via a program known as Artemis. That presence may eventually include radio telescopes on the moon's exceptionally quiet far side — and, perhaps, even more ambitious off-Earth science facilities.

Just because you were in space doesn't mean you get the wings of an astronaut. The Federal Aviation Administration set new rules concerning the Commercial Space Astronaut Wings Program and the criteria used to award those commanding, piloting or working on privately funded spacecraft with the Commercial Space Astronaut Wings badge.

The hunt for fragments of an "unusually large meteor" that lit up the skies over Norway on 25 July has begun. The meteor awakened awestruck residents of the country's capital city, Oslo, with the sound of a large explosion. Footage shows the fireball from the meteor streaking across the sky in a trail of bright flashes at around 1 a.m. local time Sunday morning before it landed somewhere in a forest near Oslo.

What's the weather like at night on Venus? Scientists are finally finding out. Just one planet away, Venus is relatively close to Earth and we have been studying it for a long time, with the first Venusian probe reaching the planet in 1978. However, scientists have known very little about what the weather is like at night on Venus. That is, until now.

For our Australopithecus ancestors who roamed Africa 2.5 million years ago, the bright new star in the sky surely would have aroused curiosity. As luminous as the full Moon, it would have cast shadows at night and been visible during the day. As the supernova faded over the following months, it probably also faded from memory. But it left other traces, now coming to light.

The world’s largest astronomy museum is opening in Shanghai, and its complex curvilinear shape has been designed to reflect the geometry of the cosmos. With no straight lines or right angles used throughout, the structure is instead formed from three overlapping arcs that allude to the orbits of celestial bodies.

The European Robotic Arm (ERA) will be launched to the International Space Station together with the Russian Multipurpose Laboratory Module, called 'Nauka'. ERA is the first robot able to 'walk' around the Russian segment of the Space Station. It has the ability to anchor itself to the Station and move back and forward by itself, hand-over-hand between fixed base-points.

Space Mysteries: A fast radio burst was detected from within our galaxy for the first time. We may be closer to uncovering its origin.

Astronomers have discovered the smallest yet most massive white dwarf star ever seen. According to a new study published Thursday in the journal Nature, the "very special" star has a mass greater than that of our sun, all packed into a relatively small body, similar in size to our moon. It formed when two less massive white dwarf stars, which spent their lives as a pair orbiting around each other, collided and merged together.

For centuries, Earthlings have gazed at the heavens and wondered about life among the stars. But as humans hunted for little green men, the extraterrestrials might have been watching us back. In new research, astronomers have drawn up a shortlist of nearby star systems where any inquisitive inhabitants on orbiting planets would be well placed to spot life on Earth.

There's a problem brewing overhead. Invisible to the naked eye and relatively unheard of, it threatens our future in space—space debris. A new "Space Sustainability Rating' is currently in development that will shed light on the problem, scoring space operators on the sustainability of their missions, increasing the transparency of their contributions to protecting the space environment and encouraging and recognizing responsible behavior.

For 30 years, astrophysicists have predicted such a slowdown, but this is the first time it has been measured. The researchers say it gives a new type of insight into the nature of dark matter, which acts like a counterweight slowing the spin.

Astronomers have spotted a giant 'blinking' star towards the center of the Milky Way, more than 25,000 light years away. An international team of astronomers observed the star, VVV-WIT-08, decreasing in brightness by a factor of 30, so that it nearly disappeared from the sky. While many stars change in brightness because they pulsate or are eclipsed by another star in a binary system, it's exceptionally rare for a star to become fainter over a period of several months and then brighten again.

Scientists have used a powerful radio telescope in the interior of British Columbia, Canada to gain incredible new insights about one of the universe’s most perplexing and brilliant phenomena: Fast radio bursts (FRBs), which are unexplained signals from space. Sometimes they’re one-offs, and sometimes they mysteriously repeat in regular intervals, beating out a cosmic pattern.

Hundreds of mysterious fast radio bursts have been detected in space thanks to a Canadian telescope and an international group of researchers. The origins of these bright, millisecond-long flashes of light are unknown because the bursts, or FRBs, are unpredictable and vanish quickly. Scientists first observed them in 2007. In the decade following, they only observed about 140 bursts across the universe.

A national laboratory in California, armed with a powerful supercomputer, is set to create a highly detailed, three-dimensional map of the universe. The customized HPE Cray EX supercomputer from Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. was installed recently at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a U.S. Department of Energy facility. NERSC is located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Berkeley, Calif.