Milky Way stars that are high and low in metallicity have been mapped by the ESA Gaia mission. [Gaia spacecraft: Mapping the Milky Way like never before. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC ...

Astronomers suspect the heart of the Milky Way may be hiding a big secret: a rapidly spinning, highly magnetic, neutron ...

In late winter, the zodiacal light is visible in the evening in the Northern Hemisphere (false dusk) and in the pre-dawn ...

Planetary systems in the Milky Way galaxy tend to follow a particular pattern: rocky planets toward the center, closest to ...

Intense radiation emitted by active supermassive black holes—thought to reside at the center of most, if not all, galaxies—can slow star growth not just in their host galaxy, but also in galaxies ...

That distinction, survival versus livability, is the hard truth behind headlines about stars consuming planets. A world does not need to be swallowed to become uninhabitable. Long before any terminal ...

For more than 60 years, scientists have been scanning the skies for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. Using powerful telescopes, they have searched for unusual radio signals, brief laser flashes ...

In a conventional system like our own, rocky planets such as Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars orbit closest to the host star. Farther out, gas giants ...

Scientists scanning the heart of the Milky Way have spotted a tantalizing signal: a possible ultra-fast pulsar spinning every 8.19 milliseconds near Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at our ...

Astronomers have searched the skies for signs of extraterrestrial technology for decades. These searchers since 1960 have ...

Sagittarius A* may be a dense dark matter core instead of a black hole, offering a new explanation for the Milky Way’s central gravity.

Researchers from Columbia University and Breakthrough Listen, a scientific research program aimed at finding evidence of ...