Researchers have discovered that the mysterious overweight stars known as blue stragglers are the result of 'stellar cannibalism', where plasma is gradually pulled from one star to another to form a…

XMM-Newton has caught the fading glow of a tiny celestial object, revealing its rotation rate for the first time. The new information confirms this particular object as one of an extremely rare class…

Many objects in the universe emit radio waves. In 1931, American physicist Karl Jansky first detected radio static from our own Milky Way galaxy. Similar emission from other galaxies creates a…

Astronomers say they may have solved one of those classic chicken-and-egg problems, namely, which came first in the early Universe, galaxies or the supermassive black holes seen at their cores. Chris…

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered 12 new gamma-ray-only pulsars and has detected gamma-ray pulses from 18 others. The finds are transforming our understanding of how these stellar…

Two new efforts have taken a famous supernova remnant from the static to the dynamic. A new movie of data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows changes in time never seen before in this type of…

We may not be using it for navigation any time soon, but a new map of our own Milky Way galaxy provides other answers about the structure of our galaxy, and resolves conflicting information gathered…

Astronomers have turned to an unexpected place to study the evolution of planets -- dead stars.  Observations made with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveal six dead "white dwarf" stars…

Let's face it, with all that talk about life on other planets and dark matter, we lose sight of the big picture.  To start 2009 off right, the Milky Way, our galaxy, wants you to know she is not…

Brown dwarfs, objects that are less massive than stars but larger than planets, just got more elusive, based on a study of 233 nearby multiple-star systems by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble…