An international team of astronomers with the Trans-atlantic Exoplanet Survey today announce the discovery of their third planet, TrES-3. The new planet was identified by astronomers looking for transiting planets - that is, planets that pass in front of their home star - using a network of small automated telescopes in Arizona, California, and the Canary Islands.

Using NASA's Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) satellite and ground-based telescopes, astronomers have determined, for the first time, the properties of a rare, extremely massive, and young binary star system.

Using NASA's Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) satellite and ground-based telescopes, astronomers have determined, for the first time, the properties of a rare, extremely massive, and young binary star system.

Astronomers, including UC Riverside's Gabriela Canalizo, have used powerful adaptive optics technology at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawai'i to reveal the precise locations and environments of a pair of supermassive black holes at the center of an ongoing collision between two galaxies 300 million light-years away.

Astronomers have long suspected the existence of the invisible substance of dark matter as the source of additional gravity that holds together galaxy clusters. Otherwise, astronomers say, the clusters would fly apart if they relied only on the gravity from their visible stars. Although astronomers don't know what dark matter is made of, they hypothesize that it is a type of elementary particle that pervades the Universe.

How old are the oldest stars? Using ESO's VLT, astronomers recently measured the age of a star located in our Galaxy. The star, a real fossil, is found to be 13.2 billion years old, not very far from the 13.7 billion years age of the Universe. The star, HE 1523-0901, was clearly born at the dawn of time.

A massive exploding faraway star, the brightest supernova astronomers have ever seen, has US scientists wondering if a similar celestial fireworks show may light up the sky much closer to Earth sometime soon.

A massive faraway star explosion was the biggest supernova that scientists have ever seen.

Wally Schirra, one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts died in hospital in La Jolla. Wally Schirra was the fifth American in space and the third American to orbit the earth. He died in 84.

Free of his wheelchair and tethered only to heart rate and blood pressure monitors, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has fulfilled a dream of floating weightless on a zero-gravity jet also becoming the first disable person to experience such flight.

Astronomers have found the most Earth-like planet outside our Solar System to date, a world which could have water running on its surface. Scientists say the benign temperatures on the planet mean any water there could exist in liquid form, and this raises the chances it could also harbour life.

Hubble's new view of the Carina Nebula shows the process of star birth at a new level of detail. The bizarre landscape of the nebula is sculpted by the action of outflowing winds and scorching ultraviolet radiation from the monster stars that inhabit this inferno. These stars are shredding the surrounding material that is the last vestige of the giant cloud from which the stars were born.