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Astronomers have made great strides in discovering planets outside of our solar system, termed "exoplanets." In fact, over the past 20 years more than 5,000 exoplanets have been detected beyond the eight planets that call our solar system home. The m...

Researchers have for the first time shown that ribose, a sugar that is one of the building blocks of genetic material in living organisms, may have formed in cometary ices. To obtain this result, scientists at the Institut de Chimie de Nice (CNRS/Uni...

At an age of only 10 million years, which means it’s practically a baby on a galactic time scale, the object identified as 2MASS J1119–1137 is between four and eight times the mass of Jupiter, and hence falls in the mass range between a l...

The scientists found radioactive iron-60 in sediment and crust samples taken from the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The iron-60 was concentrated in a period between 3.2 and 1.7 million years ago, which is relatively recent in astronomical ter...

Astronomers have uncovered a near-record-breaking supermassive black hole, weighing 17 billion Suns, in an unlikely place — in the center of a galaxy in a sparsely populated area of the universe. The observations made by NASA’s Hubble Spa...

On the heels of their participation in the historic research that resulted in the detection of gravitational waves, West Virginia University (WVU) astrophysicists continue to plow new ground and build upon their work. WVU scientists were members of ...

The bombardment of Mars some 4 billion years ago by comets and asteroids as large as West Virginia likely enhanced climate conditions enough to make the planet more conducive to life, at least for a time, said a new University of Colorado Boulder (CU...

The view looks back at the rover's tracks leading up the north-facing slope of Knudsen Ridge, which forms part of the southern edge of Marathon Valley. Mars’ Exploration Rover Opportunity took the image using its navigation camera (Navcam) on ...

Last February, a team of astronomers reported detecting an afterglow from a mysterious event called a fast radio burst, which would pinpoint the precise position of the burst's origin, a longstanding goal in studies of these mysterious events. These ...

Andromeda (M31) is a popular target among astronomers. Under clear dark skies, it is even visible to the naked eye. Its proximity and similarity in structure to our spiral galaxy, the Milky Way, make it an important natural laboratory for astronomers...

Most stars in our galaxy have a traveling companion. Often, these companions are stars of similar mass, as is the case for our nearest stellar neighbors, the triple star system Alpha Centauri. Our Sun, of course, has companions of its own — th...

Observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have led to the first temperature map of a super-Earth planet, a rocky planet nearly two times as big as ours. The map reveals extreme temperature swings from one side of the planet to the other,...

Disks of dust and gas that surround young stars are the formation sites of planets. New images from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) reveal never-before-seen details in the planet-forming disk around a nearby Sun-like star, inc...

On September 14, the terrestrial Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detected gravitational waves — fluctuations in the fabric of spacetime — produced by a pair of black holes as they spiraled towards each other bef...

Scientists have used data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the National Science Foundation’s Jansky Very Large Array to determine the likely trigger for the most recent supernova in the Milky Way. They applied a new technique tha...

For 72 seconds in 1977, the Big Ear radio telescope recorded a powerful signal streaming from the area of globular cluster M55 in Sagittarius. To Ohio State astronomer Jerry Ehman, a SETI volunteer at the time, it seemed like the exact kind of alien ...

The Cassini spacecraft has observed geysers erupting on Saturn’s moon Enceladus since 2005, but the process that drives and sustains these eruptions has remained a mystery. Now, scientists at the University of Chicago and Princeton University h...

Astronomers using an orbiting radio telescope in conjunction with four ground-based radio telescopes have achieved the highest resolution, or ability to discern fine detail, of any astronomical observation ever made. Their achievement produced a pair...

For centuries, the solar system was viewed as a standard blueprint for planetary systems in the universe, with a star (our Sun) at the center of a circular track, and a planet orbiting within each lane. Smaller rockier planets fill the interior lanes...

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) found that communication with the X-ray astronomy satellite “Hitomi” (ASTRO-H), launched on February 17, 2016, failed from the start of its operation originally scheduled at 16:40, Saturday Ma...