NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has probed the bright core of Comet 17P/Holmes, which, to the delight of sky watchers, mysteriously brightened by nearly a millionfold in a 24-hour period beginning Oct…

Rocky terrestrial planets, perhaps like Earth, Mars or Venus, appear to be forming or to have recently formed around a star in the Pleiades ("seven sisters") star cluster, the result of "monster…

Known until now as a simple number in a catalogue, NGC 134, the 'Island in the Universe' that was observed by the European Commissioner for Science and Research Janez Potočnik on a visit to ESO's…

Scientists using the largest cosmic ray observatory in the world, the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, have made an important discovery about the highest-energy cosmic rays that hit the Earth…

When the stars are shining above the atmosphere, they give off radiation across a wide spread of wavelengths. As Earth rotates, the star appears to sink down. When that happens, the atmosphere acts…

Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) have found that a supernova discovered last year was caused by two colliding white dwarf stars. The white dwarfs were siblings…

Supermassive black holes can produce powerful winds that shape a galaxy and determine their own growth, confirms a group of scientists from Rochester Institute of Technology. The RIT team has, for…

The "dark matter" that comprises a still-undetected one-quarter of the universe is not a uniform cosmic fog, says a University of California, Berkeley, astrophysicist, but instead forms dense clumps…

Two of ESO's telescopes captured various stages in the life of a star in a single image - a cosmic ghost. ESO PR Photo 42a/05 shows the area surrounding the stellar cluster NGC 2467, located in the…

Astronomers have found possible proofs of stellar vampirism in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae. Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, they found that some hot, bright, and apparently young stars in the…