The beautiful hourglass-shaped nebula Sharpless 2-106 shines with brilliant colors in this new image from the Gemini North telescope.
Giant star S106IR lies near the waist of the hourglass. Astronomers estimate the star could be up …

The mystery of why galaxies formed early in the history of the universe give birth to more stars than modern ones has been solved. An abundance of dense, cold gas fueled rapid star formation in …

Space is a pretty empty place. But it’s not completely empty, as a new map of the interstellar space surrounding the 1,000 light-years around the sun shows.
Using the light from 1,857 stars, a team of …

You’ve undoubtedly seen the smudge of the Orion Nebula hanging just below his belt thousands of times, but the most beautiful image yet of the celestial body was just released Wednesday.
The European Southern Observatory’s new …

The X marks the spot of a suspected head-on collision between two asteroids imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope’s new-and-improved Wide Field Camera.
If it’s confirmed by further observations, it would be the first time that …

The world’s oldest known living tree, a conifer that first took root at the end of the last Ice Age, has been discovered in Sweden, researchers say.
The visible portion of the 13-foot-tall (4-meter-tall) “Christmas tree” …

A Sumatran tigress and her cubs took a special interest in a World Wildlife Federation camera, sniffing and possibly licking it during a brief sequence released in late December.
The video was released as a prelude …

After years of struggling to understand how to properly assemble a galaxy, astronomers have discovered that the answer is blowin’ in the wind. The supernova wind, that is.
New computer simulations show that winds generated by …

Santorini Panorama
This panorama shows the vista from which NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity spent five weeks in November and December 2008 while the sun was nearly directly in between Mars and Earth.
Opportunity is approaching the …

Mercury was once seen as a cold, dead little world, spinning around the sun unchanged for the past 4 billion years.
No longer: Observations from the Messenger spacecraft say it’s anything but.
NASA’s orbiter is sending back …

American spacecraft had to dodge space debris four times in 2008, NASA revealed Tuesday, a fact that highlights both the extent of the space junk problem and the primary mitigation option open to NASA.
By tracking …

The Hubble Space Telescope captured this spectacular space fireworks display when a blob of matter within a 5,000-light-year-long plasma beam emanating from a giant black hole flared up.
The glowing clump of gas, first discovered in …

For the first time, scientists were able to track an asteroid from space to the ground and recover pieces of it. The bits are unlike anything ever found on Earth.
The asteroid was spotted entering Earth’s …

Behold the mesmerizing mundanity of space!
NASA has transformed the external camera on the International Space Station into a live webcam — and the view is fascinatingly dull.
For its inaugural morning, the webcam showed a live …

The growing sphere of space junk surrounding the Earth is a hazard to spaceflight, as International Space Station astronauts found out Thursday when their home was buzzed by a five-inch piece of debris.
As the story …

Small robots the size of riding mowers could prepare a safe landing site for NASA’s Moon outpost, according to a NASA-sponsored study prepared by Astrobotic Technology Inc. with technical assistance from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics …

Is gravity getting your satellite down? Too bad it doesn’t have a Mini-Helicon Plasma Thruster on board.
The aeronautics minds at MIT have developed this new propulsion system as a lighter, more fuel-efficient way to give …

NASA’s Swift Gamma-Ray Explorer satellite took this shot of Comet Lulin on Jan. 28, and regular folks may be able to catch their own glimpse with binoculars on February 23.
The image was taken as the …