Royal Astronomical Society

The work is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

NASA has released a stunning new picture of our galaxy's violent, super-energized "downtown."

It's a composite of 370 observations over the past two decades by the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, depicting billions of stars and countless black holes in the center, or heart, of the Milky Way. A radio telescope in South Africa also contributed to the image, for contrast.

The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of Oviedo present today the discovery of two new planetary systems, one of them hosting three planets the same size as the Earth.

We are all made of star stuff and some of that stuff took a long journey to get here. According to new research, galaxies exchange copious amounts of material, and half of the material that makes up the Milky Way might have originated in another galaxy.

“We are all made of stars” used to sing Moby in 2002 and though science has known it for a while, a new study went as far as to claim half of the atoms making up everything around us, and in us, may have formed beyond the Milky Way.

The star N6946-BH1 in a spiral formation 22 million light years away known as the ‘fireworks galaxy’, was last seen by Nasa’s Hubble Telescope in 2009. By 2015, it wasn’t there anymore.

KIC 8462852 continues to puzzle and fascinate scientists. Its unusual flickering has provoked an outpour of explanation, ranging from comets to an alien megastructure. Although we are pretty confident that it’s not artificial in origin, all the natural explanations have yet to be confirmed.

Astronomers proposed a novel explanation July 6 for the strange appearance of the comet carrying Europe's robot probe Philae through outer space: alien microscopic life.

The Milky Way galaxy may be home to billions of planets orbiting their host stars in a "habitable zone" where life could theoretically exist, researchers said Wednesday.
      

The Solar System has at least two more planets waiting to be discovered beyond the orbit of Pluto, Spanish and British astronomers say.
      
The official list of planets in our star system runs to eight, with gas giant Neptune the outermost.