Planets, Astronomy | featured news

Contact! For the last time in 105 years, Earthlings are watching the planet Venus creep across the surface of the sun during a scientifically significant transit that lasts almost seven hours.

It's your last chance to catch one of the rarest cosmic spectacles - Venus slowly crossing the face of the sun. Weather permitting, the transit of Venus will be visible from much of Earth - Tuesday from the Western Hemisphere and Wednesday from the Eastern Hemisphere. This sight won't come again until 105 years from now - in 2117....

It's a spectacle that won't repeat for another century - the sight of Venus slowly inching across the face of the sun....

A star already known to host five alien planets may actually be home to a whopping nine full-fledged worlds - a planetary arrangement that, if confirmed, would outnumber our own solar system and set a new record for the most populated system of extrasolar planets yet found.

The Cassini spacecraft captures striking images from flying by three moons of Saturn, including new pictures of Enceladus's gushing geysers.

Astronomers hunting for rocky planets with the right temperature to support life estimate there may be tens of billions of them in our galaxy alone.

Member state delegations to the European Space Agency reiterated their desire to press ahead with missions to Mars in 2016 and 2018.

Physicists investigating the make-up of the universe said on Wednesday they were closing in on the long-sought but elusive Higgs boson they believe was key to turning debris from the Big Bang into stars, planets and finally life.

A pair of Earth-size worlds orbiting a dying star may be the fractured remnants of a single Jupiter-like gas giant, a new study says.

After more than two decades of drilling in Antarctica, Russian scientists have reached the surface of a gigantic freshwater lake hidden under miles of ice for some 20 million years — a lake that may hold life from the distant past and clues to the search for life on other planets.