Long Beach, CA Our Milky Way is a spiral galaxy - a pinwheel-shaped collection of stars, gas and dust. It has a central bar and two major spiral arms that wrap around its disk. Since we ...

Long Beach, CA The quest for a twin Earth is heating up. Using NASA's Kepler spacecraft, astronomers are beginning to find Earth-sized planets orbiting distant stars. A new analysis of K...

The ubiquitous clouds of gas and dust found between stars provide the natal material for new stars and planets. These clouds are also dynamic factories that produce many complex molecules...

Galaxies are often found in groups or clusters. The Milky Way, for example, is a member of the "Local Group" of about three dozen galaxies, which includes the Andromeda Galaxy located abo...

Astronomers have come to realize that the process of star formation, once thought to consist essentially of just the simple coalescence of material by gravity, occurs in a complex series ...

The Sun is located about 25,000 light-years from the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Like other spiral galaxies, the Milky Way has a disk with sweeping bands of stars, gas, and dust ...

Astronomers estimate that once the Sun began to shine it took the Earth another 50-100 million years to grow to its present size, as the solar system evolved. But how did the Earth get st...

In this holiday season of home cooking and carefully-honed recipes, some astronomers are asking: what is the best mix of ingredients for stars to make the largest number of plump black ho...

Ten billion years ago or so, at least according to the current picture, the youthful universe began to produce an abundance of new stars. The very first ones appeared in the young cosmos ...

There are currently 851 confirmed extra-solar planets. Of these, 289 were detected because their orbits (as seen from Earth) take them across the face of their host star, dimming the star...