Space, Astronomy and Planetary Science News

They're bright and blue-and a bit strange. They're a new type of stellar explosion that was recently discovered by a team of astronomers led by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)

By studying the X-rays emitted when superheated gases plunge into distant and massive black holes, astrophysicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have provided an important test of a long-standing theory

Astronomers have unveiled the most complete 3-D map of the local universe (out to a distance of 380 million light-years) ever created

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has found a rare class of oddball stars called blue stragglers in the hub of our Milky Way, the first detected within our galaxy's bulge

A gamma-ray burst detected by NASA's Swift satellite in April 2009 has been newly unveiled as a candidate for the most distant object in the universe. At an estimated distance of 13.14 billion light years

An international team of astronomers [1] has used ESO's Very Large Telescope to carefully study the star VFTS 682 [2] in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small neighbouring galaxy to the Milky Way

A local supernova factory has recently started production, according to a wealth of new data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory on the Carina Nebula

How unique is the Milky Way?

Two UK astronomers have found that the giant black holes in the centre of galaxies are on average spinning faster than at any time in the history of the Universe

An international team, including NASA-funded researchers, using radio telescopes located throughout the Southern Hemisphere has produced the most detailed image of particle jets erupting from a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy