Galaxies

By retrofitting a Texas telescope with a low-cost, modular instrument, researchers hope to find clues to what is driving the accelerating expansion of our universe

Protostars shine in their dusty shrouds in this image of the molecular cloud associated with the Rosette Nebula from the European Space Agency's Herschel spacecraft .

Artist Ron Miller takes us on a journey to eight of the most breathtaking views that await intrepid explorers of our solar system. The scale of these natural wonders dwarfs anything Earth has to offer. What might we see and feel if we could travel to these distant domains? The artist's eye—interpreting data from probes such as NASA's Cassini, which is now exploring the Saturnian system, and MESSENGER, which has flown by Mercury three times and goes into permanent orbit next March—allows us an early visit to these unforgettable locales.

The mammoth infrared observatory, scheduled to launch in 2014, will look back to the first stars in the universe

Stardust mission finds particles that represent the building blocks of the solar system.

Massive black holes should not have existed in a universe less than one billion years old, yet they did

The Andromeda Galaxy, a spiral galaxy 2.5 million light-years away, is something of a big sister to our own Milky Way.

Type Ia supernovae, often used to calibrate cosmological measurements, may arise from merging white dwarfs, after all

The rapid formation of stars billions of years ago compared with the present day appears to have resulted from larger gas reservoirs rather than from a more efficient formation process

Making a star is no easy thing