Stars and Galaxies

The future is a slippery thing, but sometimes physics can help. And while human destiny will remain ever unknown, the fate of two of our artifacts can be calculated in staggering detail.

The globular cluster NGC 6397, a conglomeration of stars about 7,800 light-years from Earth, likely harbors a clump of small black holes at its heart, a new study reports.

The mystery at the heart of an unexplained, bright point of gamma-ray light in the sky has been solved: a violent, whirling redback.

A distant galaxy in the newborn universe essentially resembles a grown adult when it should just look like a small child, suggesting galaxies may evolve more rapidly than we thought.

We don't know why the universe is dominated by matter over antimatter, but there could be entire stars, and maybe even galaxies, in the universe made of antimatter.

A speculative hypothesis tries to uncover the world’s oldest story written across the night sky in the Pleiades constellation.

Astronomers have long wondered where high-energy cosmic rays come from within our galaxy. And now, new observations reveal an unlikely candidate: an otherwise mundane giant molecular cloud.

Where did the ingredients for life on Earth come from? A team of astronomers has found a crucial new link: the observation of essential "prebiotic" molecules around a still-forming star.

This hazy spiral galaxy is one of the largest in the Virgo cluster — a collection of more than 2,000 galaxies.

Ever ridden a teacup ride at a state fair? If so, you might have a small taste of life in a whirling, twirling sextuply-eclipsing sextuple star system.

Space.com recently talked with Breakthrough Initiatives executive director Pete Worden about a signal coming from the vicinity of Proxima Centauri, and about the search for alien life more generally.

Most stars in the universe today are found in massive galaxies called ellipticals, named for their stretched-out-circle shape.

Eight bright stars dominate our current winter sky. Depending on how you look at them, you might see a graceful arc, a hexagon or a giant "G."

Stars snacking on their companions outside the Milky Way have been precisely mapped and measured for the first time.

Astronomers may have captured the first good look at giant flares from the strongest magnets in the universe.

New data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Europe's Gaia spacecraft suggest that a brush with another galaxy caused the strange, potato chip-like "warp" in our Milky Way galaxy.

Data from the now-destroyed Arecibo radio telescope has revealed a bizarre new type of hybrid venomous spider star.

Three years ago, two neutron stars collided in a cataclysmic crash, the first such merger ever observed directly. Naturally, scientists kept their eye on it — and now, something strange is happening.

A citizen scientist group has created the most complete map to date of brown dwarfs neighboring our solar system.