An ambitious project aims to image the close environs of a black hole for the first time.

Jumping Neptune solves Kuiper belt mystery

The 46th anniversary of the first human lunar landing passed largely without notice in the national media last week. It’s hard to understand how such an epochal event, the fulfillment of a dream born in the first stirrings of human consciousness and deemed impossible for most of the history of our species, could fade so quickly into the historical background of American achievement.

Astronomers may have found the source of a particularly hard-to-spot group of near-Earth asteroids

Since 2010, the best estimate of the age of Earth's magnetic field has been 3.45 billion years. But now a researcher responsible for that finding has new data showing the magnetic field is far older.

The dark red pole on Pluto's largest moon Charon may be some of the dwarf planet's own siphoned-off atmosphere.

A team of researchers has discovered the first known system, Gaia 14aae, where one star completely eclipses the other — a type of a two-star system known as a cataclysmic variable.

Exploding star is twice as luminous as any other reported.

A newfound giant black hole nearly as massive as 7 billion suns is dozens of times larger than astronomers expected given its host galaxy's size, researchers say. The finding may call most current models of galaxy formation into question.

When galaxies collide, bright things happen in the universe. Using the Hubble Space Telescope's infrared vision, astronomers have unveiled some of the previously hidden origins of quasars, Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-06-galactic-fuel-quasars.html#jCp

One of science’s most crucial yet underappreciated achievements is the description of the physical universe using mathematics

Astronomers making a detailed multi-telescope study of a nearby galaxy have discovered a magnetic field coiled around the galaxy’s main spiral arm.

Theorists argue that warped space-time prevents quantum superpositions of large-scale objects.

Following on from the Sentinel-1 radar satellite, Sentinel-2 is the next ESA mission dedicated to Europe’s ambitious Copernicus programme. It carries an innovative high-resolution optical imager payload providing a new perspective of our planet's land and vegetation. The instrument's com…

Though physicists have figured out everything from the radius of black holes to the age of the universe, the physics of many everyday things remains mysterious.

NASA’s Kepler and Swift have caught unprecedented glimpses of newborn supernovae, stellar explosions that can help unravel the secrets of dark energy.

Observations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile have discovered a new class of “dark” globular star clusters around the giant galaxy Centaurus A. These mysterious objects look similar to normal clusters, but contain much more mass and may either harbour unexpected amounts of dark matter, or contain massive black holes — neither of which was expected nor is understood.

A young star in Orion's dusty nebula roughly 1,400 light-years away has erupted after munching down gas and dust.

Astronomers must rethink models about the development of large-scale cosmic structures

Astronomers from Chalmers University of Technology have used the giant telescope Alma to reveal an extremely powerful magnetic field very close to a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy. The results appear in the 17 April 2015 issue of the journal Science.