How many ways can you describe an object? If you look at an apple, you might estimate its weight, shape and color but beyond that it is difficult. We are unable to describe the chemical composition…

An international team of astronomers, led by Felipe Braga-Ribas (Observatório Nacional/MCTI, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), has used telescopes at seven locations in South America, including the 1.54-meter…

A research team has detected water vapor in the atmosphere of tau Boo b, a "hot Jupiter" planet outside our solar system.  The team applied a Doppler technique to the infrared to directly detect…

2 million images collected by NASA's orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope, which went into space in 2003, have been stitched together to create a 360 degree portrait of the Milky Way. We'd show it here,…

The world's leading particle collider experiments, Fermilab's Tevatron and CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), have joined forces. Scientists from the four experiments involved — ATLAS, CDF, CMS and…

Scientists have discovered a new, persistent structure in one of two radiation belts surrounding Earth  - high-energy electrons in the inner Van Allen radiation belt display a persistent pattern…

New evidence gathered by NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft at Mercury solves an apparent enigma about Mercury's evolution.  The data indicate the tiny planet closest to the sun, only slightly larger…

Did our two Viking landers find life on Mars in 1976? Astonishingly, thirty seven years later, we still haven't sent anything to Mars able to answer this question for sure.  None of our…

BICEP, the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization, is an experiment that used almost 100 detectors to scan the sky at microwave frequencies ( 100 GHz and 150 GHz, angular resolutions…

There's a cosmic war happening between highly luminous O-type stars and nearby protostars in the Orion Nebula . The Orion Nebula is home to hundreds of young stars and even younger protostars known…