Researchers in the US and UK have discovered one of the oldest planetary systems in the galaxy, orbiting one of the first generation of stars that formed 11.2 billion years ago when the universe was less than 20% of its current age.
Radar observations made with NASA’s 70-metre-wide Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California yesterday show that close-approach asteroid 2004 BL86 has a small moon.
Researchers in The Netherlands and United States show that a young giant planet or brown dwarf known as J1407b possesses a complex ring system 120 million kilometres in diameter.
The United Nations has declared 2015 the International Year of Light, and to recognise the start of the event, the Chandra X-ray Center is releasing a set of images that combine data from telescopes tuned to different wavelengths of light.
University of Colorado researchers are poised to update NASA on their revolutionary Aragoscope concept — a telescope in geostationary orbit capable of imaging objects in space or on Earth at hundreds of times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Yale University-led researchers have been able to study both the bright and dim phases of a quasar in a single source, an object that had dimmed by a factor of six or seven, compared with observations from a few years earlier.
The sci-fi film “Interstellar” raised the idea of space-time tunnels between worlds to recent public consciousness, but a new study prompts scientists to consider Milky Way wormholes as science fact and re-think dark matter more accurately.
Australian researchers analysing galactic dust from the last 25 million years within Pacific Ocean floor sediments found far less plutonium-244 from supernovae than expected, findings that are at odds with current theories.
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is now less than two months away from capture into orbit around Ceres for a 16-month study of the dwarf planet — and its cameras are already revealing tantalising surface details.