Researchers have analyzed measurements of the light from galaxies in approximately 8,000 galaxy clusters. Galaxy clusters are accumulations of thousands of galaxies (every light in the image is a galaxy), which are held together by their own gravity. This gravity affects the light that is sent out into space from the galaxies. Credit: Hubble Space [...]

At first glance, a weather forecaster for Venus would have either a really easy or a really boring job, depending on your point of view. The climate on Venus is widely known to be unpleasant — at the surface, the planet roasts at more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit under a suffocating blanket of sulfuric acid [...]

The monster star, known to astronomers as IRAS 17163-3907 [1], has a diameter about a thousand times bigger than our Sun. At a distance of about 13 000 light-years from Earth, it is the closest yellow hypergiant found to date and new observations show it shines some 500 000 times more brightly than the Sun [...]

A just-released video from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft takes viewers on a beautiful flyover of the giant asteroid Vesta. http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/16sep_vestaflyaround/

Even though a dwarf galaxy clear across the Milky Way looks to be a mouse, it may have once been a bear that slashed through the Milky Way and created the galaxy’s spiral arms, writes an Iowa State University astronomer in the journal Nature. Curtis Struck, an Iowa State professor of physics and astronomy, uses [...]

In the Hollywood blockbuster “Speed,” a bomb on a bus is rigged to blow up if the bus slows down below 50 miles per hour. The premise – slow down and you explode – makes for a great action movie plot, and also happens to have a cosmic equivalent. New research shows that some old [...]

They were always mysterious. 26 years had to pass before the prediction of theoretical physics was confirmed and the existence of neutrinos was finally proven experimentally in 1956. The reason for this ordeal: Neutrinos only interact by the weak interaction with other particles of matter. When a cosmic neutrino approaches the earth, it has the [...]

Though the universe is filled with billions upon billions of stars, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has been trained on a single variable star that in 1923 altered the course of modern astronomy. And, at least one famous astronomer of the time lamented that the discovery had shattered his world view. The star goes by the [...]