Science, Stars | featured news

Astronomers trawling through a mess of stellar data discover that Tau Ceti, our nearest single Sun-like star, hosts five planets - one in its "habitable zone".

Using NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope, scientists were able to detect the light of the earliest stars, which are now long since gone... One of the primary goals of the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope is to measure the starlight in the universe and use that to figure out how much light has ever shone in it. Yesterday, astronomers on Fermi’s research team announced that they have reached that goal.

Scientists have located a galaxy that gives births to more stars in a day than ours does in a year. Astronomers used NASA's Chandra X-Ray telescope to spot this distant gigantic galaxy creating about 740 new stars a year. By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy spawns just about one new star each year.

Some people seem born under an unlucky star. But some stars are equally unlucky themselves. Astronomers have spotted a star in another galaxy plunging toward a giant black hole and being ripped to shreds, sparking a flare so brilliant that observers detected it from a distance of 2.1 billion light-years.

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.

European astronomers report galaxies likely merged and churned out metal-rich stars, early in the universe. From 12 billion light years distance, the gamma ray burst, GRB 090323, was spotted by NASA satellites and then Earthly telescopes in 2009 (one light year equals 5.9 trillion miles). The blast appears to have originated in one galaxy and pierced another nearby on its way o Earth, report European Southern Observatory astronomers.

Three U.S.-born scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for their studies of exploding stars that revealed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating....

The Tatooine-like world about the size of Saturn is a frozen mass of rock and gas about 200 light years from Earth. NASA astronomers say it was discovered by the Kepler spacecraft launched in 2009. The desert planet of Tatooine is home to all manner of wonderful creatures — womp rats and banthas and jawas.

An international astronomy team reports the closest exploding star seen in four decades.