Astronomy | featured news

Skywatchers got an early holiday present this year: A total eclipse of the moon. Hanging high in the sky, the moon slowly turned from bright silver into a red disk early Tuesday. A total lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth casts its shadow on the full moon, blocking the sun's rays that otherwise reflect off the moon's surface. Some indirect sunlight still pierces through to give the moon its eerie hue.

For a few hours on the night of Dec. 20 to Dec. 21, the attention of tens of millions of people will be drawn skyward.

Scientists said Tuesday they have found the best evidence yet of ice volcanoes on Saturn's giant moon Titan. Unlike volcanoes on Earth, such ...

Our cosmos was "bruised" in collisions with other universes. Now astronomers have found the first evidence of these impacts in the cosmic microwave background.

A private company launched a spacecraft into orbit Wednesday in a bold demonstration test for NASA that could lead to the first commercial space station supply run next year and eventual astronaut rides.

A Japanese probe reached Venus on Tuesday and prepared to enter orbit on a two-year mission that would mark a major milestone for Japan's space program and could shed light on the climate of Earth's mysterious neighbor....

But Dr. Brown has a unique distinction: He was, for a few hours in 2005, the only person on Planet Earth to know that the standard nine-planet solar system model was going to require rejiggering. He had just discovered a 10th potential planet, but he had also come to see that neither Pluto nor this new heavenly body (first nicknamed Xena, then officially named Eris) really measured up to the other eight.

The discovery of a strange bacteria that can use arsenic as one of its nutrients widens the scope for finding new forms of life on Earth and possibly beyond.

The atmosphere of a relatively nearby extrasolar planet - just three times bigger than Earth - has been measured in a pioneering experiment.

This composite image of the Tycho supernova remnant combines infrared and X-ray observations obtained with NASA's Spitzer and Chandra space observatories, respectively, and the Calar Alto observatory, Spain. It shows the scene more than four centuries after the brilliant star explosion witnessed by Tycho Brahe and other astronomers of that era.