By tradition, the moons of Pluto have names associated with Hades and the underworld. But there's plenty of possibilities to choose from - and the discoverers of the planet's two tiniest moons are inviting the public to name them.
NASA's space telescope has captured a rather impressive image of a thin, glittering streak of stars known as the spiral galaxy ESO 121-6, which lies in the southern constellation of Pictor (The Painter's Easel).
An odd star that flashes like a strobe light may actually be a pair of young stars just a few thousand years old, says a team using the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes.
William Shatner, who is perhaps best known for playing Captain James T. Kirk in the original Star Trek series, called the International Space Station (ISS) today for a chat with Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield.
There's probably an Earth-sized planet with a comfortable temperature as little as 13 light years away, data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope implies.
The Seagull Nebula is a huge cloud primarily made of hydrogen gas that runs along the border between the constellations of Canis Major (The Great Dog) and Monoceros (The Unicorn) in the southern sky.
NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft has helped explain the striking narrow ribbon of charged particles emanating from the boundary of the solar system.
Astronomers believe they've worked out why there are so many fewer dwarf galaxies than predicted: they're moving so fast that their gas is simply whipped away.
Scientists from NASA's Cassini mission recently published a paper describing how a massive storm churned around Saturn until it encountered its own tail and sputtered out.
The further away scientists look, the further back in time they see. Astronomers use this method to study the evolution of the Universe by analyzing nearby and more distant galaxies and comparing their features.
We can all be picky at times, but you probably think of this planet as reasonably bearable. In a new model for what constitutes a habitable zone, however, the Earth barely scrapes over the bar.
NASA's ability to track satellites and orbiting spacecraft is about to get a big boost, following the launch last night of a next-generation communication satellite.
Astronomers using the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Telescope have spotted a star that appears to be making new planets, despite being well past the age at which it would be expected to do so.
