Using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer and its unique ability to see small details, astronomers have uncovered a flat, nearly edge-on disc of silicates in the heart of the magnificent Ant…

NASA's Dawn spacecraft is on its way to study a pair of asteroids after lifting off Thursday from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 7:34 a.m. EDT. Mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion…

Stars in galaxies are similar to people: during the first phase of their existence they grow rapidly but they slow later, and we can see it, says Dutch astronomer Mariska Kriek with the Gemini…

An international team of astronomers wants to answer the question, "Will the world end with a bang or a whimper?" Using an array of telescopes around the globe, a team of 23 researchers led by…

Astronomers have found evidence that stars have been forming in a long tail of gas that extends well outside its parent galaxy. This discovery suggests that such "orphan" stars may be much more…

Magnetars are small neutron stars that occasionally suffer extraordinarily powerful outbursts which shine X-rays across the galaxy. In 2003, astronomers saw a neutron star brighten to around 100…

Every now and then a space rock hits the world's media – sometimes almost literally. Threatening asteroids that zoom past the Earth, fireballs in the sky seen by hundreds of people and mysterious…

An international team of astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope has discovered that the south pole of Neptune is much hotter than the rest of the planet. This is consistent with the fact that…

For two generations of physicists, it has been a standard belief that the neutron, an electrically neutral elementary particle and a primary component of an atom, actually carries a positive charge…

An international team of astronomers might have discovered the missing link in the evolution of the so-called magnetic cataclysmic variable stars. They determined the spin and orbital periods of the…