Milky Way

Hints of water vapor on a world called GJ 486 b could just as well come from the planet’s host star

A dying star swallowing a giant planet hints at the fate awaiting our solar system some five billion years from now

We only have a few clues about where the sun was born. Some new ones point to a crowded origin story for our nearest star

Red dwarfs are dim bulbs but host more Earth-like planets than any other kind of star

Before exploding as supernovae, massive Wolf-Rayet stars spew gas and dust into space, seeding the formation of future stellar and planetary systems

Two giant telescopes—one in Australia, the other in South Africa—will comprise the supersensitive Square Kilometer Array

Researchers are convinced the James Webb Space Telescope has glimpsed an unexpected population of galaxies in the early universe. Now they’re trying to decide what this means for our understanding of the cosmos

A new JWST image of a star surrounded by strange, rippling spirals reveals a hidden chapter in the story of how dust spreads across the cosmos

The fabled star catalog from the ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus had been feared lost

A controversial new theory suggests the Milky Way galaxy’s arms sent comets hurtling toward early Earth, where impacts built new continental crust

The James Webb Space Telescope’s snapshots of a giant world orbiting another star show that the observatory is performing even better than expected and that its best exoplanet images are yet to come

The result offers a sneak peek at the observatory’s transformative potential for studying worlds beyond the solar system