Stories by SPACE.com

NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory captures video of superheated plasma loops far larger than Earth as they rain down on solar surface

Rocketing through space at more than three million kilometers per hour, six speedy stars were likely ejected from the giant black hole in the center of the Milky Way

Water on the moon was there as the moon formed, not delivered later by solar wind and comets

Computer models reveal a pair of 32-kilometer-long asteroids caused Vesta's crust to melt and then re-form, making it thicker than can be explained by typical rock layering

Landsat 8 will help scientists and policy makers better understand how the growing human population is affecting the planet

Recent launches by North Korea, South Korea and Iran highlight a growing trend

Beneath its pretty pink exterior, Messier 106 harbors a monster black hole that gobbles up matter at the galaxy’s center

Astronomers estimate 4.5 billion Earth-like planets are spread throughout the Galaxy

Earth's ionosphere never becomes cometlike largely because the planet has its own magnetic field that balances out the sun's influence, but Venus lacks its own magnetic field and is therefore subject to the whims of the sun's solar wind

Scientists have altered the criteria for the habitable zone—an area not too close or far away from a star—taking into account whether planets can host liquid water. This redefines where researchers believe life-forms could exist

A look at simian astronauts over the years

Springtime thawing of frozen carbon dioxide creates wandering patterns of grooves in the region's sand dunes, showing that Mars's topography is still changing despite its apparent lack of surface water and volcanoes

NASA will provide 16 infrared detectors and four spares for one of the Euclid space telescope's planned science instruments. The mission is set to launch in 2020

Balloon-borne instruments in Antarctica often fall in the first few weeks, but the Super-TIGER balloon has been airborne for 46 days, shattering a previous record of just 42 days

Personal hygiene is difficult in space, where simple tasks like cutting hair and clipping fingernails become cosmic challenges for astronauts living in zero gravity

Scientists have found evidence of polar lights on exoplanets and hope the discovery will add insight as to the strength of a planet's magnetic field

Scientists beamed a picture of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece to a spacecraft orbiting the moon—the first laser communication of its kind

Recent findings back up Einstein's thinking and cast doubt on "rolling scalar fields," an alternative theory of dark energy that suggests the accelerated expansion of the universe will change over time

The Iranian space program plans to launch a live monkey into space, despite previous failed attempts

The U.S. government refuses to spend 85 quadrillion taxpayer dollars on a Death Star, based on a fictional space station in the movie Star Wars, saying the project's fatal flaws make it susceptible to attacks by one-man starships

Five times wider than our own galaxy, the Milky Way, scientists hypothesize that the universe's largest spiral galaxy may have formed several billion years ago

NASA scientists have proposed snagging a 25-foot-wide asteroid and placing it into lunar orbit—the first step on sending a deep-space mission to Mars

The spine's elongation in microgravity can add two inches to a six-foot-tall astronaut

The fabled spaceship could join the similarly petitioned Death Star. Artificial gravity remains a big hurdle