Using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer, and its remarkable acuity, astronomers were able for the first time to witness the appearance of a shell of dusty gas around a star that had just erupted, and follow its evolution for more than 100 days.

New Hubble Space Telescope observations of six spectacular galaxy clusters acting as gravitational lenses have given significant insights into the early stages of the Universe. Scientists have found the largest sample of very distant galaxies seen to date: ten promising candidates thought to lie at a distance of 13 billion light-years

UCLA space scientists and colleagues have identified the mechanism that triggers substorms in space; wreaks havoc on satellites, power grids and communications systems; and leads to the explosive release of energy that causes the spectacular brightening of the aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights.

How do you weigh the biggest black holes in the universe? One answer now comes from a new and independent technique that UC Irvine scientists and other astronomers have developed using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

A Johns Hopkins astronomer is a member of a team briefing fellow scientists about plans to use new technology to take advantage of recent, promising ideas on where to search for possible extraterrestrial intelligence in our galaxy.

The future of fundamental physics research lies in observing the early universe and developing models that explain the new data obtained.

On April 25, one of our nearest stellar neighbors, a small, faint red dwarf known as EV Lacertae, unleashed the brightest flare ever detected from a normal star outside our solar system. The monster blast of radiation was picked up with NASA's Swift satellite, which scans space looking for Gamma-ray bursts coming from the edge of the universe.

Dr David Champion at CSIRO’s Australia Telescope National Facility and his colleagues from 20 other institutions publish their findings about the star today in the online journal, Science Express.

New research on the Antennae Galaxies using the Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows that this benchmark pair of interacting galaxies is in fact much closer than previously thought - 45 million light-years instead of 65 million light-years.

A team of Dutch and German astronomers have discovered part of the missing matter in the Universe using the European X-ray satellite XMM-Newton. They observed a filament of hot gas connecting two clusters of galaxies. This tenuous hot gas could be part of the missing “baryonic” matter. Their findings are being published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Astronomers have uncovered part of the missing matter in the universe, a discovery which they claim will help in understanding the evolution of the cosmic web in the future.

A team of astronomers looking at the universe’s distant past found nine young, unusually compact galaxies, each weighing in at 200 billion times the mass of the Sun. The findings appeared in the April 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.