Twenty years ago next month, the closest and brightest supernova in four centuries lit up the southern sky, wowing astronomers and the public alike.

Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, scientists have created a stunning new image of one of the youngest supernova remnants in the galaxy. This new view of the debris of an exploded star helps astronomers solve a long-standing mystery, with implications for understanding how a star's life can end catastrophically and for gauging the expansion of the universe.

A superbubble in space, caught in the act of forming, can help scientists better understand the life and death of massive stars, say researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

New cosmological computer simulations produced by a team of astronomers from Northwestern University, Harvard University and the University of Michigan show for the first time that supermassive black holes (SMBHs), which exist at the centers of nearly all galaxies, often come together during triple galaxy interactions.

A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows N90, one of the star-forming regions in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The rich populations of infant stars found here enable astronomers to examine star forming processes in an environment that is very different from that in our own Milky Way.

Quasars are some of the most luminous and distant objects in the universe - and appear to have something in common with ordinary light bulbs, say researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

The stars and gas which are seen in galaxies account for only a few percent of the gravitating material in the Universe.

A fast, efficient image enhancement technique developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and originally applied to improving monochrome microscope images has proved itself equally effective at the other end of the scale sharpening details on color images of distant galaxies produced by the Hubble Space Telescope.