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Prominent British-born astronomer and comet-chaser Brian Marsden has died at the age of 73 after a long illness, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said. Marsden was best known for predicting the return of Comet Swift-Tuttle in 1992, and played a key role in the "demotion" of Pluto...

NASA Nov 10, 2010 WASHINGTON — NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has unveiled a previously unseen structure centered in the Milky Way. The feature spans 50,000 light-years and may be the remnant of an eruption from a supersized black hole at the center of our galaxy. “What we see are two...

Scientists have detected two gigantic bubbles of high-energy radiation spilling out from the Milky Way's center that may have erupted from a supermassive black hole. The mysterious structures each span 25,000 light-years across, and are emitting gamma rays, the highest-energy wavelength of...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Two huge, unexplained gamma ray emitting bubbles have been discovered at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, US astronomers said Tuesday. Masked by a fog of gamma rays that appears throughout the sky, the bubbles form a feature spanning 50,000 light-years and could be the...

Astronomers using the South Pole Telescope report that they have discovered the most massive galaxy cluster ever. It lies at a distance of around 7 billion light-years away. In fact there are several galaxies located in one find. The cluster designated SPT-CL J0546-5345 weighs in at over 800...

Flowing lava can carve or build paths very much like the riverbeds and canyons etched by water, and this probably explains at least one of the meandering channels on the surface of Mars. Whether channels on Mars were formed by water or by lava has been debated for years, and the outcome is...

A newly discovered star outside the Milky Way has yielded important clues about our galaxy's evolution. Located in the dwarf galaxy Sculptor some 280,000 light-years away, the star has a chemical make-up similar to the Milky Way's oldest stars, supporting theories that our galaxy grew by...

Astronomers studying two exploding stars, or supernovae, have found evidence that the blasts received an extra boost from newborn black holes. The supernovae were found to emit jets of particles traveling at more than half the speed of light. Previously, the only catastrophic events known to...

James Delingpole London Telegraph Tuesday, Dec 22nd, 2009 If you want to know the truth about Climategate, definitely don’t use Wikipedia. “Climatic Research Unit e-mail controversy”, is its preferred, mealy-mouthed euphemism to describe the greatest scientific scandal of the modern age. Not...

PARIS (AFP) – Astronomers have discovered a new Earth-like planet that is larger than our own and may be more than half covered with water, according to a study published Wednesday in the science journal Nature. The so-called "super Earth" is about 42 light years away in another solar system...

Astronomers announced today that they have discovered a "super-Earth" orbiting a red dwarf star 40 light-years from Earth. They found the distant planet with a small fleet of ground-based telescopes no larger than those many amateur astronomers have in their backyards. Although the super-Earth...

Two key instruments from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have a new home in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington after being returned to Earth aboard space shuttle Atlantis last May. Astronauts brought back the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC-2) and the Corrective...

The constellation Orion is a hotbed of massive star formation, most prominently in the great nebula that sits in Orion's sword. The glowing gas of the nebula is powered by a group of young massive stars, but behind it is a cluster of younger stars and clumps of gas. Still gathering together...

2009-06-11 In November 2008, Caroline Moore, a 14-year-old student from upstate New York, discovered a supernova in a nearby galaxy, making her the youngest person ever to do so. Additional observations determined that the object, called SN 2008ha, is a new type of stellar explosion, 1000 times...

The smallest monocopter built by Ulrich to-date, with a maximum dimension of 95mm and a wing equal in size to a natural samara (Photo: Evan Ulrich/A. James Clark School of Engineering, U-Md.) Students at the University of Maryland’s Clark School of Engineering have turned to nature to create a...

Interaction between a dwarf galaxy orbiting around a larger galaxy with 100 times its mass. The upper left panel shows the two dwarfs approaching one another. The middle panel gives the state of the system after 2 billion years, and the right panel shows the appearance of the galaxies after 7...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – The spacesuit was one of three made for the last man to set foot on the moon, but Doug Fisher found it balled up and forgotten at the bottom of a cardboard box. Fisher has been rummaging around NASA's "attic" for about a year — exploring the recesses of the space agency's...

This teenaged supernova sleuth is working to inspire more young people to explore the hobby of astronomy. June 22, 2009 In November 2008, Caroline Moore, a 14-year-old budding astronomer in Warwick, New York, discovered a supernova. And not just any supernova: This exploding star, dubbed SN...

Are We On the Brink of Finding a Second Earth? Thursday, April 2, 2009 "It could happen almost any time now. We now have the technological capability to identify Earth-like planets around the smallest stars." David Latham - Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics To date, planet...

Science News Astronomers Unveiling Life's Cosmic Origins ScienceDaily (Feb. 13, 2009) — Processes that laid the foundation for life on Earth -- star and planet formation and the production of complex organic molecules in interstellar space -- are yielding their secrets to astronomers armed...