Astronomy

A surprisingly youthful estimate of the age of the rings has stirred a backlash.

How a young celebrity became one of the first female astronomers at Caltech, befriended Richard Feynman, and ended up the world’s foremost chronicler of the science of the night sky.

The astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz won half of the prize for their 1995 discovery of a Jupiter-like planet orbiting a nearby star. The cosmologist James Peebles won the other half for work exploring the structure of the universe.

A giant star’s death throes may offer the first evidence of a pair-instability supernova, and a glimpse of the first stars in the universe.

New measurements could upend the standard theory of the cosmos that has reigned since the discovery of dark energy 21 years ago.

For the first time, researchers have created a scale model of the twisting loops of the sun’s magnetic field.

Tiny, dim “dwarf” galaxies have been found to hide gas-spewing black holes.

After an interstellar asteroid shot past the sun, scientists realized that there’s probably a lot of itinerant rocks out there.

Astronomers have discovered a complex planetary system still swirling into existence.