Our solar system is believed to be around 4.5 billion years old, but it's difficult to know how long it actually took to form.   The reason is, basically, our 'clocks'.   Establishing…

Research suggests that the explosion of massive stars near the Solar System has strongly influenced the development of life. When the most massive stars exhaust their available fuel and reach…

I've been a great admirer of GRACE since the first time I 'met her'. That was at a meeting in Potsdam, Germany, a beautiful city just outside (on the 'wrong side' = old Eastern Germany) Berlin. I…

Half-mile-sized objects have been seen punching through parts of Saturn's F ring, leaving glittering trails behind them.  These mini-jets' trails in the rings fill in a missing link in our…

Here's an astronomy puzzles: Rather than occupying orbits at regular distances from a star, giant gas planets, like Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system, appear to prefer to occupy certain regions…

It appears that a small cabal of  billionaires -- those who got rich through innovation and who feel loyal to the future -- are about to to fund a new effort worth some excitement and attention…

Neil deGrasse Tyson shared “deeply cosmic” thoughts, whatever that is supposed to mean, and then “a fascinatingly disturbing thought” - watch it on liveleak. There is a lot one can criticize* about…

Billions of stars in our galaxy have acquired released planets that once roamed interstellar space. Those free agent worlds left the star systems in which they formed, and found a new home with a…

Astronomers believe they have found the answer to the mystery of a powerful ‘superwind’ which causes the death of stars. Stars like our own Sun end their lives with a ‘superwind’ 100 million times…

A new observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), is still under construction but it has already given astronomers a major breakthrough in understanding a nearby…