Charles Q. Choi

The most distant single star seen yet dates back to less than 1 billion years after the universe's birth in the Big Bang, and may shed light on the earliest stars in the cosmos, a new study finds.

Two giant bubbles of gamma rays and X-rays that erupted from the center of the Milky Way may stem from a supermassive black hole's feeding frenzy at the heart of the galaxy, a new study finds.

Miniature spaceships the size of cellphones could fly across the solar system using sails propelled by lasers, reaching distant destinations on very reasonable timescales.

The water that Earth has may have been here since the planet formed, and not delivered later by collisions with icy comets, a new study finds.

The Joint European Torus fusion experiment in the U.K. has set a new record for generating energy.

Distant X-rays may be the most direct evidence yet of the remains of a disintegrated planet colliding with the corpse of a star, a new study finds.

When a white dwarf star explodes as a supernova, it may be detonating like a nuclear weapon on Earth, a new study finds.

Astronomers may have for the first time detected and measured the mass of an isolated stellar-mass black hole, a new study finds.

And scientists now have a better idea of where to find them.

Black holes can not only rip stars apart, but they can also trigger star formation, as scientists have now seen in a nearby dwarf galaxy.

Three billion years ago, the dusty planet we know today was a very different world.

Earth is surrounded by a vast bubble about 1,000 light-years wide whose borders drive the formation of all nearby young stars, a new study finds.

Earth and Mars must have formed from collisions between giant moon-sized rocks rather than from clumping together of a huge amount of tiny pebbles, a new study found.

Astronomers may have, for the first time, detected a sunlike star erupting with a giant outburst 10 times larger than anything similar ever seen from our sun.

A volcanic peak standing more than a mile high on Venus may still be active, new findings show.

Strange, newly theorized "eggshell planets" may possess super-thin outer layers with ultra-smooth surfaces unlike those seen on any world to date, a new study reports.

A new electric thruster that blasts out iodine just passed a key test in orbit, a milestone that could help lead to smaller, cheaper and higher-performance spacecraft engines.

The first operation to ever collide a spacecraft with an asteroid is set to launch Wednesday (Nov. 24) and will see whether humans can deflect a potentially disastrous cosmic impact.

The fastest spacecraft ever flown, NASA's Parker Solar Probe, regularly experiences high-speed collisions with dust particles that create explosions of plasma, a new study finds.

Future Mars astronauts could make rocket fuel on the Red Planet using air, water and sunlight, a new study finds. The technology could fuel the astronauts' flights back to Earth.

Potential evidence of extraterrestrial radio signals from Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth, were likely just interference from human technology, researchers say.