The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has already uncovered two previously unknown companions of the Milky Way using preliminary observations covering just 7% of the night sky. The discoveries include an ...

There’s a star in our night sky that looks a little ill. Or maybe haunted. Or both. Don’t worry, though — it’s neither of those things. But it does have scientists excited. For the first time, ...

Why does anything rotate at all in space? To answer this question, we first need to understand how objects spin. Spinning has ...

Astronomers have determined that VVV CL001, a metal-poor globular cluster near the center of the Milky Way, is about 13.4 ...

Which way is ‘down’ has a different answer depending on where you are on Earth, in the solar system, in our galaxy and beyond.

The Milky Way is home to hundreds of billions of stars arranged in a glorious spiral pattern. But beyond the obvious spiral, ...

VLSS J0318.9+5755, a strange, musical-note-shaped radio source hiding behind the Milky Way’s dusty disk, has turned out to be the glowing remains of an ancient black hole outburst inside a massive, ...

The familiar spiral image of the Milky Way is a scientific illustration, not a photograph taken from outside our galaxy. Astronomers have spent centuries mapping its structure using telescopes, star ...

In April 1991, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft was a year and a half into its journey to Jupiter when it ran the commands to open its main antenna. Minutes later, telemetry showed that the motors had ...

A composite image reveals a radio wave shaped like a treble clef within a galaxy cluster merger. Credit: NASA / CXC / INAF-IRA / A. Botteon et al. / UKIDSS-GPS / ASTRON /LOFAR / CXC / SAO / N. Wolk ...

Capturing images of the cosmos is one way NASA scientists explore to better understand the universe. Since the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in December 2021, the agency has been ...