Yesterday (8th) I took this photograph of Venus and Mercury from the grounds of Reading University. In the photograph, Mercury is about two moon-breadths down and to the right of Venus. …

By studying the motions of different stellar populations in the disk of the Andromeda galaxy, researchers have deduced that Andromeda has had a more violent past than our Milky Way.  The…

In an interstellar race against time, astronomers measured the space-time warp in the gravity of a binary star and determined the mass of a neutron star just before it vanished from view. The…

In a new ESO image of LDN 483 and its surroundings, located about 700 light-years away in the constellation of Serpens (The Serpent), some of the stars are missing. But it's not a portent of doom, it…

Artist's impression of an Earth-sized planet in the Kepler 186 system. But what makes one planet more habitable than another? NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech By Jonti Horner, University of…

How might you make a new Earth? Our Terran "test kitchen" has given us a detailed recipe, it just wasn't clear how transposable it was in other areas, the same way a recipe in Los Angeles might not…

NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover, also known as "Oppy", is continuing its traverse southward on the western rim of Endeavour Crater despite computer resets and "amnesia" that have occurred after…

Artist’s impression shows a sunset seen from the super-Earth Gliese 667 Cc. The brightest star in the sky is the red dwarf Gliese 667 C, which is part of a triple star system. The other two more…

On Dec. 10th, ESA announced the latest important discovery regarding comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. Rosetta spacecraft orbiting the comet has found the water vapor from its target to be…

Our Milky Way is part of a cluster of more than 50 galaxies that make up the ‘Local Group’, a collection that includes the famous Andromeda galaxy and many other far smaller objects. And now one…