Astronomy News

Sep 19, 2011 by News Staff

NASA’s Kepler mission detected Kepler-16b, the closest astronomers have come to discovering Luke Skywalker’s home world of Tatooine, according to a press release from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Like Tatooine, Kepler-16b enjoys a double sunset as it circles a pair of stars approximately 200 light-years from Earth. It’s not thought to harbor life, but its discovery demonstrates the diversity of planets in our galaxy. Kepler-16b...

Sep 13, 2011 by News Staff

The HARPS team led by Michel Mayor from University of Geneva, Switzerland, announced the discovery of more than 50 new exoplanets orbiting nearby stars,...

Sep 12, 2011 by News Staff

ESO’s New Technology Telescope has captured an image of the open cluster NGC 2100. This brilliant star cluster is around 15 million years old, and located...

Aug 25, 2011 by News Staff

Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have discovered that the dwarf planet 2007 OR10 — nicknamed Snow White — is an icy...

Aug 25, 2011 by News Staff

Scientists using data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have discovered the coldest class of star-like bodies, with temperatures...

Aug 21, 2011 by News Staff

Our solar system, where planets have a range of sizes and move in near-circular paths, may be rather unusual, according to a German-British team led by...

Aug 12, 2011 by News Staff

A giant cosmic necklace glows brightly in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image. The object, aptly named the Necklace Nebula, is a recently discovered...

Aug 12, 2011 by News Staff

A team of astronomers, using the Spitzer Space Telescope, has reported the first extragalactic detection of the C70 fullerene molecule, and the possible...

Aug 11, 2011 by News Staff

SETI Institute announced that it had raised $200,000 from a crowd-sourced fundraising effort that launched this spring. The money, which came from just...

Aug 11, 2011 by Natali Anderson

An international team of astronomers has made the first undisputed detection of oxygen molecules in space. Using data from the European Space Agency’s...