Space, Astronomy and Planetary Science News

How do astronomers weigh a star that's trillions of miles away and way too big to fit on a bathroom scale? In most cases they can't, although they can get a best estimate using computer models of stellar structure

Astronomers using the South Pole Telescope report that they have discovered the most massive galaxy cluster yet seen at a distance of 7 billion light-years. The cluster weighs in at around 800 trillion Suns

Dramatic flares and bursts of energy -- activity previously thought reserved for only the strongest magnetized pulsars -- has been observed emanating from a weakly magnetized, slowly rotating pulsar

A silvery vision of a dozen balloon-like dots hovering in yesterday's clear-blue sky over West 23rd Street had thousands speculating the mysterious objects might be UFOs.

A team of astronomers has used a very large Telescope to test a very different idea -- that young galaxies can also grow by sucking in cool streams of the hydrogen and helium gas that filled the early Universe

Last January astronomers thought they had witnessed a fresh collision between two asteroids when images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope revealed a bizarre X-shaped object at the head of a comet-like trail of material

The discovery of an unconfirmed extrasolar planet, dubbed Gliese 581g, was announced last month during a press briefing on September 29th. Since that time, an Australian astronomer claims to have detected a suspicious alien signal from the same area

In an experiment exploring the chemical processes that might be going on in the hazy atmosphere enshrouding Saturn's largest moon, scientists discovered a variety of complex organic molecules

If you think global warming is bad, 11 billion years ago the entire universe underwent, well, universal warming

Using Australian telescopes, Swinburne University astronomy student Andy Green has found 'living dinosaurs' in space: galaxies in today's Universe that were thought to have existed only in the distant past