On Cerro Paranal, the 2600-metre-high mountain in Chile’s Atacama Desert that is home to ESO’s Very Large Telescope, the atmospheric conditions are so exceptional that fleeting events such as the green flash of the setting Sun are seen...

ISON as seen by Hubble earlier this spring. (Credit: NASA/ESA/Z. Levay/STScl). Comets are the big “question marks” of observational astronomy. Some, such as Comet Hyakutake and the Great Daylight Comet of 1910 present themselves seemingly...

NuSTAR has been busy studying the most energetic phenomena in the universe. Recently, a few high-energy events have sprung up, akin to "things that go bump in the night." When one telescope catches a sudden outpouring of high-energy light in the...

Screens in ESOC’s Main Control Room on the day the last command was sent to the Herschel Space Telescope, shutting the observatory off. Credit: ESA. We knew it was coming, but it is still sad to see the end of a mission. Controllers for the...

A new analysis of data from the Chandra space telescope revealed 26 black hole candidates in the Andromeda Galaxy. This is the largest collection of possible black holes found in another galaxy besides that of the Milky Way, Earth’s home...

The Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered evidence of an alien planet forming strangely far from its host star. Astronomers have said the discovery could challenge the prevailing theory about how planets form. Researchers with the Hubble program...

As we approached the giant radio telescope in rural Sardinia, I found myself implausibly dressed in a light summer frock: a Brazilian one, lavishly decorated with black army ants. I should have worn something tougher, since our outing was a treat...

As we approached the giant radio telescope in rural Sardinia, I found myself implausibly dressed in a light summer frock: a Brazilian one, lavishly decorated with black army ants. I should have worn something tougher, since our outing was a treat...

NASA has revealed that its Hubble Space Telescope made a new discovery: evidence of a planet forming at a record distance from its star, something that – if proven to be true – could then shake up current theories regarding planets and...

Assembly of the backbone of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, the primary mirror backplane support structure, is a step closer to completion with the recent addition of the backplane support frame, a fixture that will be used to connect all the...

NASA Hubble Space Telescope observations in August 2002 show that Neptune's brightness has increased significantly since 1996. The rise is due to an increase in the amount of clouds observed in the planet's southern hemisphere. These increases may...

Dark lightning occurs within thunderstorms and flings gamma rays and antimatter into space. (Science@NASA video) Discovered “by accident” by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in 2010, dark lightning is a surprisingly powerful...

Researchers have proven a new technique that will provide a clearer picture of the Universe's history and be used with the next generation of radio telescopes such as the Square Kilometer Array.

The keen vision of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has detected a mysterious gap in a vast protoplanetary disk of gas and dust swirling around the nearby star TW Hydrae, located 176 light-years away in the constellation Hydra (the Sea Serpent). The...

1) ALMA Takes Close-up of Matter Spiraling Toward a Black Hole: The new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope gets a close view of gas spiraling toward a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy 45 million...

The Subaru Telescope. Credit: National Astronomical Observatory of Japan Put another checkmark beside the “cold dark matter” theory. New observations by Japan’s Subaru Telescope are helping astronomers get a grip on the density of...

The Sunrise observatory is expected to land in Canada three or four days from now.

A previously unknown kind of variable star is on brilliant display 7,000 light-years from Earth in a new photo taken by a telescope in the Southern Hemisphere. For years scientists have known that the apparent brightness of many stars changes over...

The face-on spiral galaxy M101, or the Pinwheel Galaxy, is seen at ultraviolet and optical wavelengths in this amazing space wallpaper taken by ESA’s XMM-Newton space telescope. This image was released June 10, 2013.

Astronomers have observed the atmosphere of super-Earth "GJ3470b" for the first time using two telescopes. This super-Earth is an exoplanet, having only about 14 times the mass of our home planet, and it is the second lightest one among...