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The formation of small worlds like Earth previously was thought to occur mostly around stars rich in heavy elements such as iron and silicon.

NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) launched this morning over the central Pacific, beginning its mission to study black holes and other exotic objects.

The strange transformation of sunbeams into rings of light after traveling through small holes or gaps in foliage is similar to the projection of an image onto the back of a pinhole camera. Incidentally, a homemade pinhole camera is the safest way of viewing an eclipse if you do not have special solar viewing glasses.

This image shows changes in the target landing area for Curiosity, the rover of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory project. The larger ellipse was the target area prior to early June 2012, when the project revised it to the smaller ellipse centered nearer to the foot of Mount Sharp, inside Gale Crater.

During a powerful solar blast on March 7, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected the highest-energy light ever associated with an eruption on the sun. The discovery heralds Fermi's new role as a solar observatory, a powerful new tool for understanding solar outbursts during the sun's maximum period of activity.

Attività fotosintetica

New evidence from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory challenges prevailing ideas about how black holes grow in the centers of galaxies.

This image shows our own back yard, astronomically speaking, from a vantage point about 30 light-years away from the sun. It highlights the population of tiny brown dwarfs recently discovered by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE (red circles). The image simulates actual positions of stars.

Scientists have made a biological discovery in Arctic Ocean waters as dramatic and unexpected as finding a rainforest in the middle of a desert. A NASA-sponsored expedition punched through three-foot thick sea ice to find waters richer in microscopic marine plants, essential to all sea life, than any other ocean region on Earth.

The faint, lumpy glow from the very first objects in the universe may have been detected with the best precision yet using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The objects could be wildly massive stars or voracious black holes. They are too far away to be seen individually, but Spitzer has captured new, convincing evidence of what appears to be the collective pattern of their infrared light.