Focus: Space Channel Featured Story 2

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Researchers have discovered microbes living in a toxic volcanic lake that may rank as one of the harshest environments on Earth.

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For 28 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has been delivering breathtaking views of the universe. The latest offering is this image of the Lagoon Nebula to celebrate the telescope’s anniversary. Hubble shows the roiling heart of this vast stellar nursery in stunning unprecedented detail.

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In a new study published in Nature Geoscience, researchers analyzed remote-sensing data from two lunar missions and concluded that water appears to be evenly spread across the surface of the moon, not confined to a particular region or type of terrain as previously thought. The study was led by Northern Arizona University planetary scientist Christopher Edwards.

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A cloud of gas 300,000 light-years long is arching around the Milky Way, shunted away from two dwarf galaxies orbiting our own. For decades, astronomers have wanted to know which of the two galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, is the source of the gas that has been expelled as the two galaxies gravitationally pull at one another. The answer will help astronomers understand how galaxies form and change over time.

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Scientists at Rutgers University–New Brunswick and elsewhere are at a crossroads in their 50-year quest to go beyond the Standard Model in physics.

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Three billion miles away on the farthest known major planet in our solar system, an ominous, dark storm is shrinking out of existence as seen in pictures of Neptune taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Immense dark storms on Neptune were first discovered in the late 1980s by the Voyager 2 spacecraft. Since then, only Hubble has tracked these elusive features that play a game of peek-a-boo over the years.

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New observations with ALMA have uncovered the surprisingly clear chemical “fingerprints” of the complex organic molecules methanol, dimethyl ether, and methyl formate.

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Researchers analyzed the archived mission reports from the Apollo moonwalks to see how well moonwalkers were able to stick to their expected timelines. On nearly every extravehicular activity, activities took longer than predicted to complete.

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Astronomers have caught a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy snacking on gas and then "burping" — not once, but twice.

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There’s no holiday on Mars. While many of us earthlings will spend the final days of 2017 taking a break from work and relaxing on couches or ski slopes, the ChemCam instrument aboard NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover will keep busy—all on its own.

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Scientists are creating simulated universes – complete with dark matter mock-ups, computer-generated galaxies, quasi quasars, and pseudo supernovae – to better understand real-world observations.

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Michigan Tech team and others use a high-altitude observatory in Mexico to better understand where gamma rays come from.

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Chemists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found a compound that may have been a crucial factor in the origins of life on Earth.

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An INCITE research team, led by Jonathan Aurnou of UCLA, is using Mira to develop advanced models to study magnetic field generation on Earth, Jupiter and the sun at an unprecedented level of detail.

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Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found a blistering hot planet outside our solar system where it “snows” sunscreen. The problem is the sunscreen (titanium dioxide) precipitation only happens on the planet’s permanent nighttime side.

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Late Tuesday, the ChemCam instrument that sits atop NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover fired its 500,000th shot at a Martian rock.

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The surprising results of a Northern Arizona University astronomer's new study find that there are 3.5 million house-sized meteoroids whose orbits bring them close enough to Earth to pose potential impact hazards—ten times fewer than previously thought.

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Scientists have discovered the strongest evidence to date for a stratosphere on a planet outside our solar system. The exoplanet WASP-121b results obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope are published in the journal Nature.

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Saturn’s frigid moon Titan has a curious atmosphere. In addition to a hazy mixture of nitrogen and hydrocarbons, like methane and ethane, Titan’s atmosphere also contains an array of more complex organic molecules, including vinyl cyanide, which astronomers recently uncovered in archival ALMA data. Under the right conditions, like those found on the surface of Titan, vinyl cyanide may naturally coalesce into microscopic spheres resembling cell membranes.

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Breakthroughs in solar panel cooling tech will help keep NASA’s Parker Solar Probe operating at peak performance — even while flying through the sun’s corona

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Astronomers used the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia to create the largest image ever of the dense band of star-forming gas that weaves its way through the northern portion of the Orion Nebula.

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A new study by a UW-Madison undergraduate not only firms up the idea that we exist in one of the holes of the Swiss cheese structure of the cosmos, but helps ease the apparent disagreement between different measurements of the Hubble Constant, the unit cosmologists use to describe the rate at which the universe is expanding today.

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New findings based on NASA’s Curiosity rover mission reveal that an ancient lake in Gale Crater on Mars had chemical and physical properties very similar to those common to lakes on Earth.

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A University of Washington-led international team of astronomers has used data gathered by the Kepler Space Telescope to observe and confirm details of the outermost of seven exoplanets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1.

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Astronomers using ALMA have made the first complete millimeter-wavelength image of the ring of dusty debris surrounding the young star Fomalhaut.

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Former Apollo astronauts at a space symposium on May 8 doubted whether commercial companies will be able to accomplish human space travel, while representatives of those companies talked about redefining what it means to succeed—or fail—in such grand endeavors.

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Hubble Space Telescope celebrates its 27th birthday with a striking pair of very different looking spiral galaxies. The edge-on galaxy (left) is called NGC 4302, and the tilted galaxy (right) is called NGC 4298. Although the pinwheel galaxies look quite different because they are angled at different positions on the sky, they are actually quite similar in terms of their structure and contents.

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Astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to take this dazzling photo of Jupiter when the planet was comparatively close to Earth, at a distance of 415 million miles.

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An international team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered a supermassive black hole that has been propelled out of the center of the distant galaxy 3C 186. The black hole was most likely ejected by the power of gravitational waves.

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The inner Van Allen belt has less radiation than previously believed, according to a recent study in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Observations from NASA’s Van Allen probes show the fastest, most energetic electrons in the inner radiation belt are actually much rarer and harder to find than scientists expected. This is good news for spacecraft that are orbiting in the region and can be damaged by high levels of radiation.

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A new citizen science project, led by astronomers at the University of Minnesota, is asking for help from the public to identify and categorize hundreds of thousands of ring patterns within images produced by VERITAS gamma-ray observatory cameras.

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As NASA prepares for its journey to Mars, one UAB researcher is investigating why so many astronauts suffer from poorer vision after they return to Earth.

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University of Iowa students have built a device to recreate Earth’s auroras and other space phenomena in miniature. The planeterrella is the only one of its kind in Iowa and one of just a handful in the United States.

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Astronomers using ALMA have discovered a surprising connection between a supermassive black hole and the galaxy where it resides.

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Jason Steffen, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at UNLV, discusses the ways in which exoplanet research have shaken up the theoretical models.

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A collaborative study involving Brookhaven, MIT, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro suggests the gas cloud from which our solar system formed lasted about 4 million years.

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Northwestern University researchers studying the gut bacteria of Scott and Mark Kelly, NASA astronauts and identical twin brothers, as part of a unique human study have found that changes to certain gut “bugs” occur in space.

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Where did the materials that make up the Earth and moon come from—and when did they arrive?

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Interstellar forecast for a nearby star: Raining comets! The comets are plunging into the star HD 172555, which resides 95 light-years from Earth. The comets were not seen directly around the star. Astronomers inferred their presence when they used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to detect gas that is likely the vaporized remnants of their icy nuclei.

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New research by cosmologists at the University of Chicago and Wayne State University confirms the accuracy of Type Ia supernovae in measuring the pace at which the universe expands. The findings support a widely held theory that the expansion of the universe is accelerating and such acceleration is attributable to a mysterious force known as dark energy.

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Cameras on the Dawn Space Probe have performed a very special feat: they have succeeded in taking photos of water ice deposits in places ruled by almost eternal darkness on the dwarf planet Ceres.

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An international team of scientists, including researchers from the University of Chicago, has made the rare discovery of a planetary system with a host star similar to Earth’s sun. Especially intriguing is the star’s unusual composition, which indicates it ingested some of its planets.

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Radio and plasma instrument designed and built at UI may provide clues about Saturn’s auroras, thunderstorms