Keith Cooper

The idea that life on Earth arose through a series of improbable "hard" evolutionary steps may be misjudged, according to a new paper that says our Earth had a big say in matters.

A flash of X-ray light has revealed the existence of an odd couple of stars, a massive star and a white dwarf, that shouldn't really exist together.

By tracking the TV signal back to the plane that was reflecting it towards the Murchison Wide-field Array, astronomers will be able to learn how to remove it from their data.

As the most intense star-forming region in the Local Group, 30 Doradus is of particular importance to astronomers.

Sometimes the end of the mission isn't really the end.

The creation of the belts, and others like it in the future, are a potential new danger to astronauts and satellites headed to geostationary orbit and beyond.

By tracing the corkscrew wobble of two stars as they move through the sky, the Gaia space mission has discovered one new giant "planet," plus a new brown dwarf.

Wrinkle ridges that formed in the past 160 million years suggest recent geological activity on the moon.

There are many obstacles to overcome before humans can set foot on Mars, including problems surrounding launch mass and closed-loop systems and the hazards of space radiation.

Located less than 20 light years away, HD 20794d could potentially be one of the most Earth-like planets found so far, despite its extreme climatic variability.

Computer algorithms can model the universe, matching simulations to observations and revealing the distribution of dark matter.

Buttes and mesas in Mars' Chryse Planitia contain clay minerals made from liquid water interacting with the rock nearly 4 billion years ago.

Spacecraft powered by electric propulsion could soon be better protected against their own exhaust, thanks to new supercomputer simulations.

The young protostar T Tauri is about to be eclipsed by a huge disk of gas and dust that could prompt the star to fade or even disappear.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, astronomers have discovered icy exocomet belts circling 74 different alien planetary systems.

Measurements of the distance to the Coma Cluster of galaxies find that it is millions of light years closer than the standard model predicts.

A century ago, humans didn't know other galaxies existed. Here's how Edwin Hubble changed that view.

The shells of carbon-rich dust are expanding outward into space at the breakneck velocity of 1,600 miles per second.

The International Space Station is always falling, yet it never crashes to Earth or burns up in our atmosphere. How is this possible?

Dark matter, antimatter, W bosons and neutron lifetimes all feature in our top 10 stories.

An object that orbits in the space between Jupiter and Neptune has chemistry that could tell us more about the birth of the solar system.

An ancient exoplanet dated at 12.7 billion years old could have formed over a long period in a giant disk of gas, according to new JWST observations.