Planet-hunting spacecraft's first images released

NASA's new planet-hunting telescope has beamed back the first images of a patch of faraway sky in the Milky Way galaxy where it hopes to find Earth-like planets. NASA on Thursday released several images snapped by Kepler earlier this month, including a view of a distant part of our galaxy containing some 14 million stars. Scientists say more than 100,000 of those stars are potential candidates for research.

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Telescope blasts into space to find other Earths

NASA's planet-hunting telescope, Kepler, rocketed into space Friday night on a historic voyage to track down other Earths in a faraway patch of the Milky Way galaxy.

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Milky Way — the galaxy — not snack-sized anymore

Take that, Andromeda! For decades, astronomers thought when it came to the major galaxies in Earth's cosmic neighborhood, our Milky Way was a weak sister to the larger Andromeda. Not anymore.

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Galaxy's youngest known supernova is 140 years old

Astronomers have discovered the youngest known supernova in the Milky Way galaxy, still just a baby at 140 years old. The scientists, who announced their findings Wednesday, used a radio observatory in New Mexico and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in space to identify when the supernova, or stellar, explosion occurred. They put the star-dying event at sometime around 1868.

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Milky Way's dark matter modelled in best detail yet

The large bright glow in this simulation represents the colossal halo of dark matter surrounding the Milky Way as it was about 3.4 billion years ago. Smaller clumps of dark matter are also visible because they do not merge into larger structures. Curiously, many of these small clumps do not seed dwarf galaxies. The image shows a region of space about 2.6 million light years across (Illustration: J Diemand/M Kuhlen/P Madau/UCSC)

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"The Inuit people believed that the Pleiades that we see in our skies is actually the polar bear followed by seven wolves, and that the snow they kick up becomes the Milky Way," De la Sota says, explaining each of the faint hieroglyphics seen throughout the painting.

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Collins' New Egypt Book Gives New Meaning to Adage 'As above, so below' as He Reveals Caves Beneath Giza Plain

Although the title and advance news of this latest book by Andrew Collins promotes the discovery of a vast cave network beneath the Giza plain, in fact that part of the book is just one section of the volume.

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A dramatic new vista of the center of the Milky Way galaxy from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory exposes new levels of the complexity and intrigue in the Galactic center.

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A new magnificent 800-million-pixel panorama of the entire sky has been unveiled online today.

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A LARGE satellite galaxy may be lurking, hidden from view, next door to our own.

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New calculations by Ryan O'Leary and Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics suggest that hundreds of massive rogue black holes, left over from the galaxy-building days of the early universe, may wander the Milky Way.

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Time lapse video of night sky as it passes over the 2009 Texas Star Party in Fort Davis, Texas. The galactic core of Milky Way is brightly displayed. Images taken with 15mm fisheye lens.

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Astronomers have unveiled an unprecedented new atlas of the inner regions of the Milky Way, our home galaxy, peppered with thousands of previously undiscovered dense knots of cold cosmic dust — the potential birthplaces of new stars.

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The nearby, well-known and very bright star may soon explode in a supernova, according to data released by U.C. Berkeley researchers Tuesday. More Articles

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Using a technique called Pixel-lensing, a group of astronomers in Italy may have detected a planet orbiting another star. But this planet is unique among the 300-plus exoplanets discovered so far, as it and its parent star are in another galaxy. More Articles

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1n 1999, Astronomers focusing on a star at the center of the Milky Way, measured precisely how long it takes the sun to complete one orbit (a galactic year) of our home galaxy: 226 million years.

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"This morning, NASA successfully launched the world's first gamma ray shuttle to the galactic center of the Milky Way. Once there, geo-astronauts say they can mine and harvest enough raw antimatter to power Earth's energy needs for the next decade.

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Research by a theoretical physicist at Indiana University shows that the crusts of neutron stars are 10 billion times stronger than steel or any other of the earth's strongest metal alloys. More Articles

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Like some kind of massive cosmic toilet bowl, the multitude of galaxies that populate the known Universe are swirling inexplicably toward a tiny 20-degree plane of deep space. More Articles

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Hundreds of massive black holes left over from the early universe may wander the Milky Way, according to new calculations.

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MATTER and energy are vanishing without a trace at the centre of the Milky Way, providing the best evidence so far that a black hole is lurking there.

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Astronomers testing a giant dust cloud at the heart of the Milky Way have found that it might taste of raspberries, according to reports.

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Hubble was not the first space telescope but it is by far the most sophisticated, providing earthlings with unprecedented detail and spectacular views of their universe.

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A Duke University professor and his graduate student have discovered a universal principle that unites the curious interplay of light and shadow on the surface of your morning coffee with the way gravity magnifies and distorts light from distant galaxies. More Articles

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In the first observation if its kind, scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science and San Diego State University were able to watch what happens when a star the size of 50 suns explodes.

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British military investigators interviewed a woman who claimed to have met a man from another planet while she was walking her dog, newly released Ministry of Defence files have revealed. More Articles

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Two newfound black holes on the verge of crashing into each other could be creating "ripples" in the fabric of space-time, astronomers suggest. More Articles

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While Times Square is not known for star gazing — the celestial kind, that is — and few people would normally venture onto a pitch-black ball field in Inwood to see the constellations, two unrelated, if not unlikely, projects hope to turn the city's night eyes skyward.

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What is the chance that alien life exists? Nasa's latest mission - the Kepler Space Telescope due to launch on Friday night to survey the heavens for Earth-like planets - could soon give us an answer.

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