Astronomers at NASA have used the Chandra X-Ray Observatory to conduct a detailed study of an enormous cloud of hot gas enveloping two large, colliding galaxies.
Earth’s atmosphere is critically important to all of us. In addition to providing us with air to breathe, it protects us from temperature extremes, harmful space radiation, and vast numbers of incoming meteoroids.
The European Space Agency's Herschel (ESA) space observatory has exhausted its supply of liquid helium coolant, ending more than three years of pioneering observations of the cool Universe.
A University of Washington astronomer is using Earth's interstellar neighbors to learn the nature of certain stars too far away to be directly measured or observed, and the planets they may host.
The Universe is rarely static, although the timescales involved can be very long indeed. Since modern astronomical observations began we have been observing the birthplaces of new stars and planets, searching for and studying the subtle changes that help us to figure out what is happening within.
When galaxies form new stars, they sometimes do so in frantic episodes of activity known as starbursts. These events were commonplace in the early Universe, but are rarer in nearby galaxies.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft recently managed to provide the first direct evidence of small meteoroids breaking into streams of rubble and crashing into Saturn's rings.
An international research team led by astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy recently used a collection of large radio and optical telescopes to investigate a pulsar and its white dwarf companion.
Astronomers have discovered a galaxy transforming gas into stars with almost 100 percent efficiency - a rare phase of galaxy evolution that is the most extreme yet observed.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has offered astronomers their clearest view yet of Comet ISON, a newly-discovered sun grazer comet that may light up the sky later this year, or come so close to the Sun that it disintegrates.
The European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel space observatory has solved a long-standing mystery as to the origin of water in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, finding conclusive evidence that it was delivered by the dramatic impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in July 1994.
Palomar 2 is part of a group of 15 globulars known as the Palomar clusters. These clusters, as the name suggests, were discovered in survey plates from the first Palomar Observatory Sky Survey in the 1950s, a project that involved some of the most well-known astronomers of the day, including Edwin Hubble.
A few years ago, researchers revealed that the universe is expanding at a much faster rate than originally believed — a discovery that earned a Nobel Prize in 2011.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has photographed the iconic Horsehead Nebula in a new, infrared light to mark the 23rd anniversary of the famous observatory's launch aboard the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990.
NASA's Kepler mission has discovered two new planetary systems that include three super-Earth-size planets in the "habitable zone," the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water.
