Building a terrestrial planet requires raw materials that weren't available in the early history of the universe. The Big Bang filled space with hydrogen and helium. Chemical elements like silicon and oxygen - key components of rocks - had to... ...

Most of the mass of any galaxy is expected to be "dark matter," the elusive X Factor that has yet to be detected but which astronomers believe must exist to provide sufficient gravity to prevent galaxies ripping themselves apart as... ...

A 2012 search for molecular oxygen in the Orion Nebula came up negative, leading to new ideas on what's wrong in the chemical models. Searches for interstellar molecular oxygen, O2, have a long history, and the motivation for these searches... ...

Dark galaxies are essentially devoid of stars, therefore they don’t emit any light that telescopes can catch. This makes them virtually impossible to observe unless they are illuminated by an external light source like a background quasar. The...

The Chandra X-Ray Observatory image above highlights the black hole, Sagittarius A*, at the Milky Way's galactic center, which lies in the heart of the constellation of Sagittarius at a distance of ~8 kiloparsecs from the Sun. Monitoring of x-ray... ...

Dark galaxies are essentially devoid of stars, therefore they don’t emit any light that telescopes can catch. This makes them virtually impossible to observe unless they are illuminated by an external light source like a background quasar. The...

A busy patch of space has been captured in the image below from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Scattered with many nearby stars, the field also has numerous galaxies in the background. Located on the border of Triangulum Australe (The... ...

An international team of researchers has mapped the motions of structures of the nearby universe in greater detail than ever before. The maps are presented as a video, which provides a dynamic three-dimensional representation of the universe through...

A team of researchers has discovered evidence that an extrasolar planet may be forming quite far from its star—- about twice the distance Pluto is from our Sun. Planet formation far away from a small parent star is at odds... ...

Using more than 150 Chandra X-ray Observatory observations, spread over 13 years, researchers identified 26 black hole candidates, the largest number to date, in the Andromeda Galaxy, one of the nearest galaxies to the Milky Way. Many consider...

“Each bright city light is a galaxy, and the dark areas between the lights that appear to be empty during the night are actually full of dark matter. You can think of the dark matter in a galaxy cluster as... ...

“Hydrogen is the building block of the Universe, it’s what stars form from and what keeps a galaxy ‘alive’,” said Jacinta Delhaize a researcher with theInternational Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). In research published in the...

A new project aclled "Lone Signal" believes that crowd sourcing messaging to intelligent life (METI) is the ideal approach to establishing a stable, cohesive, and well-resourced interstellar beacon on Earth. Anyone with Internet access to compose...

"Mars is not a dead planet -it undergoes climate changes that are even more pronounced than on Earth," says James Head, planetary geologist, Brown University. The prevailing thinking is that Mars is a planet whose active climate has been confined... ...

Saturn can vibrate like a bell within periods of a few hours, and these oscillations cause gravitational tugs that, in turn, create the spiral patterns in the rings. The cause of the vibrations remains unknown. Researchers at Cornell found the... ...

A Swiss team from the famous Geneva Observatory has achieved extraordinary precision using a comparatively small 1.2-metre telescope for an observing programme stretching over many years. They have discovered a new class of variable stars by...

Jupiter's Europa might not only sustain, but foster life, according to the research of University of Arizona's Richard Greenberg, a professor of planetary sciences and member of the Imaging Team for NASA's Galileo Jupiter-orbiter spacecraft. The...

"Most models for dark matter assume that it interacts through exotic forces that we do not encounter in everyday life. Anapole dark matter makes use of ordinary electromagnetism that you learned about in school – the same force that makes... ...

Nearly a decade ago, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory caught signs of what appeared to be a black hole snacking on gas at the middle of the nearby Sculptor galaxy. Now, NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), which sees higher-energy...

"The Arctic is warming dramatically - two to three times faster than mid-latitude regions - yet we lack sustained observations and accurate climate models to know with confidence how the balance of carbon among living things will respond to...

he Hubble Space Telescope site estimates there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. A recent German super-computer simulation estimates that the number may be as high as 500 billion, with many older than the Milky Way. Common... ...

The least massive galaxy in the known universe has been measured by UC Irvine scientists, clocking in at just 1,000 or so stars with a bit of dark matter holding them together. The findings, made with the world’s most powerful... ...

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The pulsar, a.k.a. the "Black Widow," is moving through the galaxy at a speed of almost a million kilometers per hour. A bow shock wave due to this motion is visible to optical telescopes, shown in this image as the... ...