American Astronomical Society

What could a massive new telescope in Hawaii teach astronomers about the universe — and why are some native Hawaiians fiercely opposed to the project?

Looking for life traditionally starts with finding a planet with the right temperature — but scientists are working to find new criteria for tracking down potentially habitable worlds.

NASA faces a difficult choice: What does the agency want to select as its next big space telescope, the instrument that will shape scientists' research in the 2040s?

Stars don't see gender, and now, NASA is working to not see it either when allocating telescope time to scientists, inspired by a successful experiment with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Pluto's discovery wouldn't have been possible, astronomers have realized, without the calculations of a mathematician whom history has forgotten.

Coronal mass ejections aren't known for being subtle: Each such event can fling huge amounts of the soup of charged particles called plasma off the sun and out into the solar system.

In order to study planets, you have to look at stars, so you may as well analyze what you see.

Photographing an alien world is incredibly difficult. Now try doing it from a massive balloon high in Earth's atmosphere.

NASA's New Horizons mission turned Pluto from a fuzzy blob into a detailed, geophysically complex world. But it's still a little fuzzy, as it turns out.

Move over, red dwarfs. Emerging research shows that another star type could be more friendly to life.

A tiny satellite studying alien worlds may be gone for good, but during the two years the spacecraft operated, it laid the foundation for what may become a new way of finding exoplanets.

Heated conversations at the American Astronomical Society's January meeting are usually about stars and galaxies, distant worlds and elaborate calculations.

Several supermassive black holes have been found wandering through their dwarf host galaxies, offering new clues about how similar black holes evolved in the early universe.

A new 3D movie highlights the Crab Nebula, beginning with its location in the constellation Taurus and zooming in to show off its dynamic features.

Two cosmic love birds lit the way to the discovery of dark matter, and a new Hubble image features a behemoth galaxy that played a part in the groundbreaking finding.

When scientists search for alien planets, they get a special thrill when they find one that seems to reflect our own world back to us.

Astronomers using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite found that the star ancient Egyptians once used as their North Star is part of a binary pair of stars that eclipse one another.

It turns out that dark matter forms smaller "clumps" than scientists thought, confirming a fundamental prediction about the mysterious substance.

Nobody knew they'd be this bright.