What happens when you think you have seen a recent collision between two asteroids but find a bizarre X-shaped object at the head of a comet-like trail of material?    You keep looking…

How do astronomers weigh stars?    In most cases stars that are trillions of miles away can't be measured, though astronomers can get a best estimate using numerical models. But in some…

Human presence in space enable us to do more than just observe Earth from a far. We develop space technology that come in handy here on Earth in numerous applications. Or, as is so touchingly…

What's 7 billion light years away, equivalent in weight to 800,000,000,000,000 of our Suns and holds hundreds of galaxies?    It's the most galaxy cluster ever discovered, that's what.…

Two weeks ago we posted a story on Gliese 581g - a planet that was discovered and said to be in the habitable zone of a star.   Our comment was that reduced chi-squared statistics may mean that…

A 32-foot asteroid flew between the Earth and the Moon this morning.  It was spotted in advance.  It did not hit the Earth, but passed about 28,000 miles up.  If it had hit the Earth,…

Astronomers are certainly not strangers to manipulating public relations through mass media - they write reasonable papers and then encourage the press to go nuts with it.   Witness the recent…

A new report in Nature Geoscience says there may be large deposits of carbonate sedimentary rocks a few miles beneath the surface of Mars. If substantial carbonate minerals exist it might indicate a…

"TAU researcher confirms oily "water" on a Saturn moon", so reads the email that crossed my desk.  Then I learned why no mountain or landform on Titan can ever be taller than 6,200 feet. …

A persistent hypothesis is that perhaps life did not 'originate' on Earth at all, perhaps its building blocks came from space. In April, the public, fed by astronomy's runaway hype train, were…