Space, Telescope | featured news

Europe's Herschel space telescope has imaged one of the most popular subjects in the sky - the Horsehead Nebula - and its environs. The distinctively shaped molecular gas cloud is sited some 1,300 light-years from Earth in the Constellation Orion.

For years, astronomers have known about the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, but these pictures from NASA's NuSTAR telescope show a rare view of the usually sleeping giant gobbling down a cosmic snack.

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.

Amateur astronomy sounds simple in theory: Get a telescope, point it at the sky and look. But gaze into the night sky and you'll see countless points of light. How do you find a single star or constellation out of the vast expanses of space? What equipment should you use? It can all be a little intimidating. So PM asked several accomplished astronomers about the best way to start stargazing.

Science editor Alan Boyle's Weblog: The spiral galaxy NGC 3521 is a swirling maw of raw power, measuring 50,000 light-years across. So why on earth do astronomers call it "fluffy"?

It may not be possible to travel back in time, but seeing stars and galaxies as they looked millions or even billions of years ago is no problem thanks to telescopes, the closest thing we have to time machines.