Space, Astronomy and Planetary Science News

A cosmic one-two punch of colossal volcanic eruptions and meteorite strikes likely caused the mass-extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period that is famous for killing the dinosaurs 65 million years ago

Some of Milky Way's 'stellar fossils' -- our galaxy's oldest stars -- contain abnormally large amounts of heavy elements like gold, platinum and uranium

Violent star formation plays host to some of the highest-mass stars in our galaxy, is an ideal arena in which to study the interactions between young stars and their parent molecular clouds.

Scientists have been warning that the sun's solar cycle which peaks in 2012, could cause powerful solar storms that could leave many places on earth without communication and electricity for months

Just as an expert chess player sacrifices a piece to protect the queen, the solar system may have given up a giant planet and spared Earth, according to an article recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters

The discovery of 13 diffuse interstellar bands with the longest wavelengths to date could someday solve a 90-year-old mystery. Astronomers have identified the new bands using data collected by the Gemini North telescope of stars in the center of the Milky

A team of scientists has used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to observe a quasar accretion disc -- a brightly glowing disc of matter that is slowly being sucked into its galaxy's central black hole

In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, astronomers have hunted for radio signals and ultra-short laser pulses. In a new paper, Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and Edwin Turner (Princeton University) suggest a new technique

Fat doughnut-shaped dust shrouds that obscure about half of supermassive black holes could be the result of high speed crashes between planets and asteroids, according to a new theory from an international team of astronomers

he European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft has revealed asteroid Lutetia to be a primitive body, left over as the planets were forming in our Solar System.