Browsing Tag: Astronomy

One out of every five sun-like stars in the Milky Way galaxy has a planet about the size of Earth that is properly positioned for water, a key ingredient for life, a study released on Monday showed.

The meteor that exploded over Russia Friday was slightly larger than previously thought and more powerful, too, NASA scientists say.

Scientists are revisiting the age-old question of how Earth’s moon formed. New models indicate that it could have been born from the Earth following a giant collision after all.

All of this has long since become a standard part of astronomy textbooks. What's not standard at all is the idea of a star actually turning into a planet — but that, says Matthew Bailes, astronomer at Australia's Swinburne University of Technology and lead author of the Science paper, isn't as crazy as it sounds.

Astronomers have cracked the Milky Way like a piñata, and planets are now pouring out so fast that they do not know what to do with them all.

Thanks to Earth's wobble, astrological signs are, well, bunk. (Or even more bunk than you might expect.) Astrological signs are determined by the position of the sun relative to certain constellations on a person's day of birth.

Using two NASA X-ray satellites, astronomers have discovered what drives the “heartbeats” seen in the light from an unusual black hole system.

Something big is going on at the center of our galaxy, and astronomers are happy to say they don’t know what it is.

The unusual "knot" in the bright, narrow ribbon of neutral atoms emanating in from the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space appears to have "untied," according to a paper published online in the Journal of Geophysical Research.