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Something very strange is happening around the star KIC 12557548. Its light dims every 15 hours, as though a planet is orbiting around it...except the dimming varies wildly each time around. A planet is being vaporized before our eyes. More »
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This is AB7, a binary star system found in one of the nearby Magellanic Cloud galaxies. The two stars are constantly venting massive amounts of stellar material. That process is heating up one of the stars to absolutely unimaginable temperatures. More »
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Now that Facebook is going over to the new "timeline banner," finding a good banner image can be a time-consuming process. So let us help you. We've tracked down some of the coolest banner images online, plus created a few new ones from scratch. More »
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The biggest batch of young stars in our galaxy form inside the mouth of the Dragonfish. The 'fish' is a gas shell of material around the newly-forming stars. It was named by Doctor Mubdi Rahman, of the University of Toronto, who was inspired by Peter Shearer's portrait, entitled Black Dragonfish. More »
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The little number you see up top — titled "Chart of comets, star clusters and nebula" — was engraved in 1856 by one W. G. Evans for Burritt's Atlas to Illustrate the Geography of the Heavens. More »
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About 6500 light years from earth, there's a red chicken in the sky. There may even be more than one. Many people report seeing a chicken in this new Hubble image of the Lambda Centauri Nebula, earning it the nickname "Angry Bird Nebula" and "Chicken Nebula," but they clash over exactly where the bird is. Some see the dark outline of a chicken in the center of the red cloud, while others see an animated-looking bird face with a tuft of feathers on its head, with bright star eyes and a red curved beak. More »
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Check out this totally breathtaking image of Jupiter and two of its moons, Io and Ganymede — it's not just an astounding image, it's also officially the coolest astronomy photo of 2011, according to the Royal Observatory's annual contest. More »
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As Moby once said, "We are all made of stars" — all the elements heavier than hydrogen, helium and lithium were formed in the solar furnaces of the original stars before being spewed forth into the universe to create everything else. But a newly analyzed star in the Leo constellation has characteristics that shouldn't be possible — and will require us either to rethink what we know of the universe, or what we know of stars. More »
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An international research team has found an exoplanet made entirely of diamonds. Although this may seem glamorous, researchers think it is only the desolate remains of a star, robbed of its mass by its companion. More »
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The universe just isn't what it used to be. Billions of years ago, when the universe was still in its infancy, the casual observer would have seen stars forming all around him, and at a pretty rapid clip. In recent years, however (i.e. the last few billion), the rate of star formation has slowed to a fraction of its former pace. Now, a team of Australian astronomers believes it knows why. More »
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NLTT 43806 is a white dwarf, the dying remnants of a star like our own. But there's a problem. Its composition doesn't make any sense...unless there was a cataclysm just like the one Earth experienced four billion years ago. More »
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Although every supernova has some things in common — a big boom, for example — there are plenty of different types. And different reasons why a star might go nova. More »
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A proto-star has been observed shooting water from its poles out into space. It may continue to do so for over a thousand years. Scientists think that this process may account for much of the free-floating water in the universe. More »
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Sometimes astronomy goes nuts in many different ways at once. On rotating neutron stars (pictured), it gets particularly wild, because superfluids are involved. The result? Stars covered in highly regular triangular patterns — as if somebody built them that way. More »
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A new class of supernova has been discovered, with six examples of it seen so far. Powered by a mysterious source, they're brighter and longer-lived than the novae we know now. More »
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How we see the universe is defined by where we're standing, and that can create some fundamental misconceptions about the cosmos. Case in point: this time-lapse video that reminds us it isn't the stars that are moving...it's the Earth itself. More »
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One of the awesome things about the universe is that it's big enough for crazy-wonderful things to happen. Luckily, astronomy lets us see them. For example, there's a star where it's raining olivine crystals right now. More »
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The stars are always moving through the night sky, but the effect is so slow that it's hard to really grasp it. That's why there's this video, which throws in various Greek landmarks just to be even more ridiculously beautiful. More »
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Scientists have noticed that the bigger explosions out come from the smaller galaxies. If star size were purely random, bigger galaxies with more stars would have larger explosions. Find out why small galaxies produce massive booms. More »
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Everything in this image is so far away that it defies our comprehension. And yet we're also looking at two vastly different scales here, as stars from well within our own galaxy share space with a far distant spiral galaxy. More »
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The universe is mostly empty, but once in a great while stars get close enough to crash into each other. Two stars recently combined to form Sco V1309. Find out what happened when they did. More »
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Located some hundred million light-years from here, these colorful galaxies can be seen behind the stars that make up the constellation of Pisces. We don't know exactly how these galaxies got here...but they're certainly amazing sights to look at now. More »
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Four hundred and thirty million light-years from earth a ring of black holes is forming, possibly around some very nervous aliens. In the constellation Cetus lies ARP 147, the remains of a spiral galaxy and an elliptical galaxy that . . . interacted. More »
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This is nebula NGC 2174, located about 6400 light-years away. This amazing photograph makes the nebula look like the peak of a giant dust mountain, with strange pink stars dominating its summit. In fact, the stars are locked in cosmic battle with the gas mountain, and it's only a matter of time before the stars emerge victorious and destroy this ghostly peak. More »
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Until recently, astronomers believed that the first stars were ultra-giants which blew themselves apart long ago. Now a new model of the universe suggests that some the first stars of the universe may still be burning today. More »
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Sark is a tiny, car-free island in the English Channel that didn't fully get rid of feudalism until 2008. Its nights are so reliably dark that it's just been named the world's first "dark sky island", making the island one giant observatory for looking up at the night sky without any light pollution to get in the way. More »
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This might look like a strange work of modern art (or possibly a secret level in Super Mario Galaxy), but everything in this photo of the Greek promontory Sounio is completely real. Not convinced? We'll explain what's going on here. More »
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If you charted the appearance of certain stars in books through the last two centuries, which ones would get the most hits? More »
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The Whirlpool Galaxy looks beautiful and swirling in a visible light image (at left.) But the infrared view, at right, shows a maelstrom of chaos, revealing the dense lanes of dust around normally invisible clusters of stars. More »
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Behold this gorgeous time-lapse video of the Milky Way rising in the night sky, captured by Justin Majeczsky at a gorgeous Lake Tahoe vantage point. Look closely and you can see Sagittarius! More »
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Check out that extra-bright galaxy towards the top of this image. That's an elliptical galaxy, which are among the largest galaxies in the universe. And now scientists believe these galaxies hold five to ten times more stars than previously thought. More »
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A recent study shows that the intense bar of light you see here, joining the arms of this spiral galaxy, may be a sign of stellar death. More »
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The most massive neutron star ever discovered has been found 3000 light-years away. The tiny star is twice as massive as the Sun but its diameter is mere miles across. This discovery confirms these stars really are made of neutrons. More »
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A new study estimates that one in four sun-like stars have Earth-sized planets — far more than previously thought. It challenges current theories on how planets form, and may mean a greater chance of finding habitable worlds. More »
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It's Friday, which means we could all use a touch of cosmic amazement to kick-start our work-numbed souls. Cue NASA's fantastic art showing the star-making machinery at the core of the galaxy. Even more of it below. More »
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An enigmatic star appears simultaneously both young and old, baffling astronomers for decades. Now we know why - it discovered the star equivalent of the fountain of youth by devouring a nearby companion, creating second generation exoplanets in the process. More »
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Three different sets of binary stars - two stars locked in orbit around each other - are surrounded by huge clouds of dust. Astronomers suspect these are the remains of gigantic planetary collisions caused by the binary stars' intense gravity. More »
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The universe's oldest galaxies are showing their whippersnapper counterparts a thing or two when it comes to producing baby stars. A shockingly modern-looking galactic cluster from ten billion years ago is churning out new stars in ways never before seen. More »
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A star went supernova with more than twice the mass needed to ultimately collapse into a black hole. But something weirder happened - the star became a magnetar, an asteroid-sized star with the most powerful magnetic field in the universe. More »
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1,500 light-years away from Earth and around the Orion Nebula, the Herbig-Haro 34 young object is in its protostar stage. Herbig-Haro 34 is ejecting two large jets that propel a massive miasma of dense gas toward its cosmic neighbors. More »
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