Space, Astronomy and Planetary Science News

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., will house the agency's new Einstein Probes Office, created to study the universe's exotic phenomena: dark energy, black holes and cosmic microwave background radiation.

The search for life elsewhere in the solar system and beyond should include efforts to detect what scientists sometimes refer to as "weird" life -- that is, life with an alternative biochemistry to that of life on Earth

Researchers at the University of Southampton have developed a software package for modelling asteroid impacts that enables them to assess the potential human and economic consequences across the globe.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has revealed for the first time surface details of Saturn's moon Hyperion, including cup-like craters filled with hydrocarbons that may indicate more widespread presence in our solar system of basic chemicals necessary for life.

By incorporating the physics of black holes into a highly sophisticated model running on a powerful supercomputing system, an international team of scientists has produced an unprecedented simulation of cosmic evolution

On July 4, fireworks blaze over the skies of American cities in the annual Independence Day celebrations. But nearly 12.5 million light-years away in the dwarf galaxy NGC 4449 stellar "fireworks" are going off all the time.

With an eye toward learning more about the elements that make up the universe and everything in it, Argonne scientists have reached the latest milestone in an upgrade of ATLAS, a leading facility for nuclear structure research in the United States.

Christopher T. Russell, UCLA professor of geophysics and space physics, has spent 15 years working on NASA's Dawn mission to the doughnut-shaped asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. As the scheduled July 7 launch from Cape Canaveral nears, Russell is r

In nearly 13 printed pages with a host of calculations, research may have solved the information loss paradox that has perplexed physicists for the past 40 years.

The world is abuzz with the discovery of an extrasolar, Earth-like planet around the star Gliese 581 that is relatively close to our Earth at 20 light years away in the constellation Libra.