Astrophysics

Astronomers use Kepler telescope to study weather on Jupiter-size planets beyond our solar system

The bright lights from these hungry black holes revealed a subtle background field

Seventy years ago the renowned astronomer undertook a daring rescue of the renowned physicist as the Red Army swept across a defeated Germany.

The first results from the upgraded Large Hadron Collider, syntactic foam, a Fibonacci clock, and a worm with a fractal nose glove are among this week's highlights.

Two new studies hint at a richer picture of what’s happening on Saturn’s extraordinary icy moon Enceladus. At about 500 kilometers in diameter, Enceladus is a diminutive natural satellite.

Astronomer Alan Smale spends his days at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center exploring celestial objects, but he's also the author of Clash of Eagles, an alternate-history novel in which a Roman Legion invades North America

High-energy photons from the Milky Way’s core suggest dark matter may soon be found by the world's most powerful particle accelerator

A vast region of space colder than expected is also largely devoid of galaxies, and the two observations are no coincidence. Clara Moskowitz reports

Controversy swirls around a bold proposal for a bigger, better—and expensive—replacement for NASA’s premier space telescope

16-year-old Paul Vermeesch recreate the impossible structures in M.C. Escher's Relativity--but with a Star Wars theme--in LEGO.

On April 30, if all goes well, after running out of fuel to fight off orbital decay NASA’s long-running MESSENGER spacecraft will end its mission to Mercury by crashing into the planet’s surface at nearly 4 kilometers per second.

What happens when you make a low-level flyby of a cometary nucleus? You get jaw-dropping images. The above 2-shot mosaic of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was taken by ESA’s Rosetta orbiter at an effective altitude of just 19.9 kilometers.