A faint, irradiated streak carved into nearby interstellar clouds is giving astronomers their clearest evidence yet that two massive stars once brushed past our cosmic neighborhood and almost slammed ...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Astronomers have discovered a rare solar system in the Milky Way that boasts six planets orbiting in perfect rhythm like a cosmic orchestra, untouched by outside forces since ...

The Milky Way looks serene from our vantage point, a hazy river of light arcing across the night sky. Yet the stars that make ...

NASA's Pleiades supercomputer has provided fresh insights into the Oort cloud – a vast, theoretical spherical shell of icy objects that surrounds our solar system. For a long time, the Oort cloud's ...

Our solar system has been orbiting the Milky Way's black hole heart for 4.6 billion years. But it is hard to pin down exactly how many trips around the galaxy our sun has made during that time. When ...

Spiral Galaxy from Kirkland et al. CREDIT Chris Kirkland and colleagues. A new study of zircon crystals from two of Earth’s oldest continents indicates that the formation of Earth’s continental crust ...

Measuring the mass of our galaxy has always been a complex task: We can’t see it in full and most of it is made of dark matter. To weigh the Milky Way, it is necessary to understand how things move ...