Cosmology

NASA's MESSENGER orbiter has found evidence of pure water hiding near the planet's cool north pole

An eruption of matter from a quasar could show how galaxies shed weight

Experiments to detect dark matter, which scientists believe makes up about a quarter of the universe, are underway and may yield direct evidence within a decade

Thanks to gravitational lensing by a cluster of galaxies, the light emitted by a small galaxy 13.3 billion years ago has reached Earth. John Matson reports

Astronomers using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii recently discovered ( pdf ) a "super-Jupiter" orbiting the star Kappa Andromedae (κ Andromedae) a star about 2.5 times the mass of our sun located about 170 light-years from Earth.

Long thought nearly extinct, the Andromedid meteor shower staged a surprise outburst last December—and may return in 2018 and 2023

The spiral, created by a red giant's companion star, lets astronomers see when layers of the red giant were lost

The newest measurements, courtesy of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, come from infrared observations of distant variable stars

Astronomers have found two stellar-mass black holes in a surprising cohabitation within a cluster of Milky Way stars

Zooming in on Galaxy M87 reveals answers about the turbulent environment surrounding the invisible black hole at its center

What fuels a white dwarf's luminous nuclear detonation?

Scientists have envisioned a space-time crystal with cyclical structure in time as well as space