In 1774 the French astronomer Charles Messier published a catalog of 109 fuzzy-looking objects he discovered in the heavens. He thought they might be mistaken for comets, and today we kno...

Cambridge, MA Brian Schmidt (Australian National University) and the High-z Supernova Search team have been awarded the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize for their discovery that the universe'...

Astronomy, unlike many other scientific disciplines, has no laboratorieswhere its experiments can unravel the secrets of nature. Instead, it relies on meticulous and clever observations ...

Almost 400,000 years after the universe was created in the big bang, it cooled sufficiently for neutral atoms to form, thereby allowing the pervasive light to propagate almost completely ...

The Earth, Mercury, Venus, and Mars are known as the rocky planets because they are composed predominantly of rocks which contain silicon, iron, and other heavy elements. Jupiter and Satu...

The glowing nebula of warm gas and dust known as IC348 is located about 1,000 light-years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation of Perseus. It has long been known that IC 348...

There are many different kinds of stars, with the primary determining factors being a star's mass and age. The naked-eye star Phi Herculis (Phi Her), located near the left foot of the co...

Venus is so much like the Earth in its size and composition that it is sometimes called our sister planet, but it differs in at least one relatively dramatic way: it has very little water...

For a few hundred thousand years after the creation of the universe in the big bang, the universe was so hot that neutral atoms could not exist. Once the universe cooled to a few thousand...

Honolulu, HI Today, astronomers unveiled the sharpest photograph ever taken of the nearby spiral galaxy Messier 81. The image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows stunning detail in ...