A stray comet from another star swings past Earth this week in one last hurrah before racing back toward interstellar space.

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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured an uncommon sight—the death of a low-mass star—in this image of the Calabash Nebula released on Feb. 3, 2017.

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The giant planets weren’t always where we find them today. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune formed in a more compact configuration and later underwent a violent reshuffling that scattered them to their current positions. Exactly what triggered this chaos remains uncertain, but researchers at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux and the Planetary Science Institute now […]

On 12 December 2025 at 03:09:36 UTC, astronomers at the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium (AOP) have captured what is believed to be the first video recording of a lunar impact flash in Ireland, and the second recorded from the UK.

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The first exoplanet ever discovered in 1995 was what we now call a “hot Jupiter,” a planet as massive as Jupiter with an orbital period of just a few days. Today, hot Jupiters are thought to have formed far from their stars—similar to Jupiter in our solar system—and later migrated inward.

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One of the oldest unsolved riddles in planetary science concerns the origin of the moon. Over a century ago, George Darwin proposed that tidal and centrifugal forces on a rapidly rotating proto-Earth caused the moon to be spun off into an Earth orbit.

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The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are irregular dwarf galaxies and satellites of the Milky Way. The LMC is about 163,000 light-years away and the SMC is about 206,000 light-years away, and their close proximity makes them excellent laboratories for the study of galaxies in general. The Clouds are the focus of a new research […]

Rocky planets like our Earth may be far more common than previously thought, according to new research published in the journal Science Advances. It suggests that when our solar system formed, a nearby supernova (the massive explosion of a star near the end of its life) bathed it in cosmic rays containing the radioactive ingredients […]