Satellite navigation is having an enormous impact on our daily lives. In practical terms it means the only place left to get lost is indoors, where satnav signals fail to reach. But one ESA project is changing that.
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Today ESO has released a dramatic new image of NGC 346, the brightest star-forming region in our neighboring galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud, 210 000 light-years away towards the constellation of Tucana (the Toucan). The light, wind and heat...
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Near the center of a Martian crater about the size of Connecticut, hundreds of exposed rock layers form a mound as tall as the Rockies and reveal a record of major environmental changes on Mars billions of years ago. The history told by this tall...
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A magnificent image of the giant stellar nursery surrounding NGC 3603, in which stars are continuously being born. Embedded in this scenic nebula is one of the most luminous and most compact clusters of young, massive stars in our Milky Way, which...
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has observed a mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and trailing streamers of dust that suggest a head-on collision between two asteroids. Astronomers have long thought that the asteroid belt is being ground down through...
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An international team led by astronomers at the University of Hertfordshire have discovered what may be the coolest sub-stellar body ever found outside our own solar system. What has excited astronomers are its very peculiar colors, which actually...
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Mars exploration rover Opportunity is allowing scientists to get a glimpse deep inside Mars. Perched on a rippled Martian plain, a dark rock not much bigger than a basketball was the target of interest for Opportunity during the past two months....
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Astronauts aboard the International Space Station received a special software upgrade this week - personal access to the Internet and the World Wide Web via the ultimate wireless connection.
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Dunes of sand-sized materials have been trapped on the floors of many Martian craters. This view shows dunes inside a crater in Noachis Terra, west of the giant Hellas impact basin in Mars' southern hemisphere.
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For the first time, two astronomers have explained the diversity of galaxy shapes seen in the universe. Galaxies are the collections of stars, planets, gas and dust that make up most of the visible component of the cosmos. The smallest have a few...
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Astronomers using the W. M. Keck Observatory have discovered 33 pairs of black holes in distant galaxies. The new results verify that these waltzing black holes are more common than previously observed.
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Most searches for planets around other stars, also known as exoplanets, focus on Sun-like stars. Those searches have proven successful, turning up more than 400 alien worlds. However, Sun-like stars aren't the only potential homes for planets.
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More often than not you will hear the answer "Because the Sun does not shine at night, of course!" Or more precisely, because sunlight does not reach the side of the Earth that is facing away from the Sun. Both answers cannot quite satisfy...
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Earth's home galaxy, the Milky Way, consists of more than 100 billion stars and its spiral arms extend across 100,000 light-years. As if these were not already virtually inconceivable numbers for humans, the Milky Way is only one galaxy among...
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There are more and more signs that lakes exist on Saturn's moon Titan, filled with liquid hydrocarbons. Scientists have made another important discovery. With a spectrometer on-board the planetary space probe Cassini, they found glints that have...
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The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered the smallest object ever seen in visible light in the Kuiper Belt, a vast ring of icy debris that is encircling the outer rim of the solar system just beyond Neptune.
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