An international team of planet hunters has found four new planets orbiting two nearby stars that are very similar to the Sun. These discoveries point the way to the detection of potentially habitable worlds within a few years. The planets were found by Australian, American and British astronomers using...

VISTA (the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy), a new telescope, has just started work at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. VISTA is a survey telescope working at infrared wavelengths and is the world’s largest telescope dedicated to mapping...

Ever heard about a Cannibal galaxy? Read on to find out more about an interesting galaxy that eats other galaxies! A new technique using near-infrared images, obtained with ESO’s 3.58-metre New Technology Telescope (NTT), allows astronomers to see through the opaque dust lanes of the giant cannibal...

Preliminary data from NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, indicates the mission successfully uncovered water in a permanently shadowed lunar crater. The LCROSS spacecraft and a companion rocket stage made twin impacts in the Cabeus crater October 9 that created a plume...

Good news for all who are interested in black holes! Astronomers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, find that an X-ray source in galaxy NGC 5408 that represents one of the best cases for a middleweight black hole to date. While astronomers have studied lightweight and...

Earlier this week, a team of astronomers, who built the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), the spectrograph for ESO’s 3.6-metre telescope, announced the discovery of 32 new exoplanets. The announcement was made at an international ESO/CAUP exoplanet conference in Porto. Exoplanets...

The first solar system energetic particle maps, based on data collected by NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer satellite (IBEX),  show an unexpected landmark occurring at the outer edge of the solar wind bubble surrounding the solar system. Scientists published these maps in the October 15 issue...

NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft, that was launched in October 2008, has made it possible for scientists to construct the first comprehensive sky map of our solar system and its location in the Milky Way galaxy. The sky map, that was produced with data that two detectors...