Space, Astronomy and Planetary Science News

Picture the Milky Way galaxy-a disk of stars and gas, a stellar spheroid and an enormous halo of dark matter. It spirals around a black hole that is supermassive-about three million solar masses. The Milky Way's total mass is about 100 billion solar masse

University of Colorado at Boulder researchers will scan Venus during a spacecraft flyby this week using an $8.7 million instrument they designed and built for NASA's MESSENGER Mission, launched in 2004 and speeding toward Mercury.

Two and a half years after the historic landing of ESA's Huygens probe on Titan, a new set of results on Saturn's largest moon is ready to be presented.

XMM-Newton has surveyed nearly two hundred stars under formation to reveal, contrary to expectations, how streams of matter fall onto the young stars’ magnetic atmospheres and radiate X-rays.

In a study of more than 1,000 void galaxies, astronomers found that the growth of monster black holes – with masses millions to hundreds of millions times that of our sun –are found where galaxies are sparse and interact very little with each other.

Astronomers now have a new "eye" for determining the distance to certain mysterious bodies in and around our Milky Way galaxy. By taking advantage of the unique position of NASA's Spitzer's Space Telescope millions of miles from Earth

University of Michigan astronomers combined light from four widely separated telescopes to produce the first picture showing surface details on a sun-like star beyond our solar system.

An international team of astronomers with the Trans-atlantic Exoplanet Survey have announced the discovery of their third planet.

A team of astronomers has recalculated the explosion date of the famous Crab Nebula supernova and found excellent agreement between their measurements and the classic date of the 1054 A.D. appearance of a bright "guest star" seen in the constellation of T

Huge waves that struck Reunion Island and coastlines across Indonesia earlier this month all originated from the same storm that occurred south of Cape Town, South Africa, and were tracked across the entire Indian Ocean