Astronomy

A drilling expedition to the Chicxulub crater turned up new details of the immediate aftermath of the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs.

Back in April the world got its first direct glimpse of a black hole. Now the team behind this historic work is being awarded a Breakthrough Prize.

A bright explosion in the sky in 2016 has now been identified as a kilonova, where two neutron stars collide and create gold.

It looks like a Jackson Pollock painting, but this colorful mess is a new map of the Milky Way, showing strange star structures.

If it was in our solar system, the orbit of exoplanet HR 5183 b would swing from the asteroid belt to way out beyond Neptune.

Astronomers use Hubble and Spitzer to forecast tonight's hot Jupiter weather report: cloudy with a chance of rocks.

Although it outnumbers regular matter by a ratio of five to one, dark matter is frustratingly elusive, and efforts to hunt down different types of candidate particles have revealed no direct trace. Now, researchers from Max Planck have proposed a new hypothetical particle that might be behind dark matter – the superheavy gravitino – and outlined just how we might find them.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one of the most intriguing mysteries of modern astronomy. Now a whopping eight new repeating signals have been detected.

Astronomers have detected a gravitational wave signal that appears to be caused by a black hole swallowing a neutron star. Aside from being an incredible cosmic cataclysm to witness, this detection is important for another reason: it may be the final point in the gravitational wave trifecta.

Just how common are potentially habitable Earth-like planets? Researchers on a new study claim to have come up with the most accurate estimate yet – and they’re more common than you might think.

Data from the Juno probe found that Jupiter's core is less dense and more spread out than expected. Now, astronomers believe they have an answer – a huge ancient planet, with 10 times the mass of Earth, crashed into the gas giant in the early days of the solar system.

Of all the things you don’t want to lose, an asteroid with a chance of striking Earth is pretty high up the list. A potentially dangerous space rock called 2006 QV89 has been missing in action for 13 years, but now astronomers have finally found it, and ruled out an impact within the next century.