On March 29, 2012, the science team for NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope learned that a defunct Cold-War spy satellite would pass too close for comfort on April 4.
Astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to photograph the iconic Horsehead Nebula in a new, infrared light to mark the 23rd anniversary of the famous observatory's launch.
Three unusually long-lasting stellar explosions discovered by NASA’s Swift satellite represent a previously unrecognized class of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs).
An exploding star observed in 1604 by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler held a greater fraction of heavy elements than the sun, according to an analysis of X-ray observations from Suzaku.
NASA's Astrophysics Explorer Program has selected two missions for launch in 2017: a planet-hunting satellite and an International Space Station instrument to observe X-rays from stars.
NICER will gather scientific data revealing the physics of the densest matter allowed in nature, and could revolutionize our ability to travel to the far reaches of the solar system and beyond.
Astronomers from the University of Maryland at College Park (UMCP) and Lowell Observatory have used NASA's Swift satellite to check out comet C/2012 S1 (ISON).
While performing an extensive X-ray survey of our galaxy's central regions, NASA's Swift satellite has uncovered the previously unknown remains of a shattered star.
Two X-ray space observatories, NASA's NuSTAR and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton, have teamed up to measure the spin rate of a black hole with a mass 2 million times that of our sun.
A new study using observations from Fermi reveals the first clear-cut evidence the expanding debris of exploded stars produces some of the fastest-moving matter in the universe.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has selected three NASA-nominated science teams to participate in their planned Euclid mission, including one led by Goddard Space Flight Center.
Engineers working on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope met another milestone recently with they completed performance testing on the observatory's aft-optics subsystem.
The barred spiral galaxy NGC 6872 has ranked among the biggest stellar systems for decades. Now a team of astronomers has crowned it the largest-known spiral, based on archival data from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) mission.
Newly released NASA Hubble Space Telescope images of a vast debris disk encircling the nearby star Fomalhaut and a mysterious planet circling it may provide forensic evidence of a titanic planetary disruption in the system.
In 2011, a months-long blast of energy launched by an enormous black hole almost 11 billion years ago swept past Earth. Astronomers have zeroed in on the source of this ancient outburst.
NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, set its X-ray eyes on a spiral galaxy and caught the brilliant glow of two black holes lurking inside.
Black holes range from modest objects formed when individual stars end their lives to behemoths billions of times more massive that rule the centers of galaxies.
Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have uncovered a previously unseen population of seven primitive galaxies that formed more than 13 billion years ago, when the universe was less than 4 percent of its present age.
