Astronomy | featured news

Science editor Alan Boyle's blog: The best way for most of us to watch asteroid 2012 DA14 come within 17,200 miles of Earth, and then recede harmlessly into the cosmos, is to watch the show online.

A meteor streaked across the sky and exploded over Russia's Ural Mountains with the power of an atomic bomb Friday, its sonic blasts shattering countless windows and injuring nearly 1,000 people. The spectacle deeply frightened many Russians, with some elderly women declaring that the world was coming to an end. Many of the injured were cut by flying glass as they flocked to windows to see what the source was for such an intense flash of light.

Russian officials say a meteorite has fallen in the Chelyabinsk region some 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) east of Moscow.

The Mars rover Curiosity drilled into the Martian surface for the first time as part of an effort to learn if the planet most like Earth in the solar system ever had conditions to support microbial life, NASA said on Saturday.

A 150-foot-wide asteroid will come remarkably close to Earth next week, even closer than high-flying communication and weather satellites. It will be the nearest known flyby for an object of this size....

Researchers find that 6% of red dwarf stars host habitable, Earth-sized planets - meaning the closest may be just 13 light-years away.

An asteroid will give Earth a historically close shave next week, but there's no chance that the space rock will slam into our planet on this pass, experts say.

The technology behind 3D printing has allowed users to craft musical instruments and prosthetic limbs, and now European scientists are taking a serious look at printing their own moon base.

Another company joined the commercial space race Tuesday with ambitious plans to mine asteroids near Earth, but experts say the physics and economics of the Final Frontier remain still daunting.

Based on information from the GALEX program, astronomers have crowned spiral galaxy NGC 6872 the largest known galaxy in the universe.