Stars and Galaxies

Two previously discovered galaxies have been hiding strange perpendicular rings of stars and gas. These so-called polar ring galaxies may prove to be less rare in the universe than once thought.

Astronomers normally observe galaxies by observing light these objects emit, but some tricky galaxies require a different approach.

A new image from the European Southern Observatory captures a cosmic wildflower in space.

A new photo from the Hubble Space Telescope captures a glittering globular cluster deep in our Milky Way galaxy.

Look to the east in the evenings throughout September to find the Great Square of Pegasus, a group of four stars of roughly equal brightness, as it climbs higher in the night sky.

An immense bubble of galaxies, one billion light years wide and located 820 million light-years away, could be fossilized remains of the Big Bang.

The magnetic field is a thousand times weaker than Earth’s, but is spread out across 16,000 light years.

Finding more debris from stellar explosions will tell us about how heavy elements are distributed across the galaxy.

The Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 photographed a massive protostar lurking behind star-forming clouds of dust and gas in the constellation Ara.

A dead star feeding on a stellar companion seems to have two brightness modes. It's because, astronomers discovered, the system launches cosmic cannonballs.

A brown dwarf just 18.5 light-years from Earth has been found to host a radiation belt. But why are scientists are so excited about this?

The discovery represents the first evidence that low-mass T.Tauri stars, which are less than 10 million years old, can emit gamma radiation.

A distant galaxy sparkles from the soft glow of its many tiny stars in a new photo from the Hubble Space Telescope.

By modeling the neutrinos from a supernova as an exotic kind of fluid moving at nearly the speed of light, researchers are searching for signs of how neutrinos can interact with each other.

ESO's Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) snapped a new photo of the globular cluster NGC 6723 containing hundreds of thousands of gravitationally-bound stars.

A newly discovered, highly magnetic and massive helium star could explain how magnetars, stellar corpses with the universe's strongest magnetic fields, are born.

The foundations of Michigan State University's first astronomy building recently came to light, showing a long history of telescope work in the Wolverine State.

The enormous waves are the result of gravitational tides dragging around stellar material.

A century-old mystery of how galaxies shift shapes has been solved by considering "survival of the fittest" collisions between cosmic titans also revealing the Milky Way was not always a spiral.

Whether you're a frequent jet-setter or a couch potato, you travel much more than you think, thanks the motion of the Earth, sun, Milky Way galaxy and more.