Milky Way

The scale of the cosmos exceeds the bounds of human comprehension. But that doesn’t mean the universe is beyond our understanding

Maps of stellar motions can show whether the Milky Way will someday merge with the Andromeda galaxy—and a whole lot more

Scientists have finally found the compact object at the heart of the famous supernova of 1987, and it’s not a black hole

Despite being some six billion kilometers away, the sun from Pluto would be a dazzling sight to behold—carefully, that is

Images of possible planets around white dwarf stars suggest that some gas-giant worlds survive the deaths of their stellar host

We’re looking for another Earth. But how likely is it that we’ll find a duplicate of home?

Glowing methane on a brown dwarf dozens of light-years from Earth may signal the presence of a large lunar companion

A serendipitously discovered object nearly as massive as the Milky Way appears to be made of primordial gas that has formed almost no stars

Information theory can help us decode signs of biological activity hiding in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets

Astronomy is beautiful and elegant. The language we use to describe its processes is anything but

Middle-aged stars hit cruise control, stifling their magnetic fields and resisting the slowdown that scientists expected

No one has ever seen a newborn star feeding on its natal disk anywhere outside our galaxy—that is, until now