What happened in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang?  Super-sensitive microwave detectors, built at the National Institute of Standards and…

So you wanna be an astrophysicist? Try this route! Leave a well-paying NASA job to get a Ph.D. Begin studying solar CMEs ... while the sun is at solar minimum. Assessing how the web is kicking…

For over three decades, globes of Mercury were blank on one side. Though Mariner 10 explored the small planet in three flybys in 1974 and 1975, no more than half was ever seen.   Of the four…

An extremely deep Chandra X-ray Observatory image of a region near the center of our Galaxy has resolved a long-standing mystery about an X-ray glow along the plane of the Galaxy. The glow in the…

From CNN: Scientists spot oldest ever object in universe Wow, that gamma ray from the exploding star GRB 090423 is so old.  Why do we even keep it around?  It’s like, 95% as old as time.…

Calculations by Ryan O'Leary and Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics suggest that hundreds of massive black holes, left over from the galaxy-building days of the early…

The Daytime Astronomer, Tues&Fri here, via RSS feed, and twitter @skydayTwo days ago, I woke up blind. Couldn't open my eyes-- lids were fused shut. For that early morning hour, I had to question…

In ancient stories, and even some newer ones, the appearance of a comet or any heavenly object could symbolize a God's displeasure and even mean a sure failure in battle for one side.   Tel Aviv…

The farthest we have 'seen' in space just got a little farther away, thanks to ESO's Very Large Telescope and GRB (Gamma Ray Burst) 090423. VLT has shown that a faint gamma-ray burst detected last…

1609 Johann Kepler formalizes his first and second laws of planetary motion