Is Earth really exceptional?  A new book seems to reaffirm that notion.  But given the right conditions, primitive life may be a mere byproduct of biophysics.

"For the first time, we could trace the boundary between the gas residing in galaxies and the material contained within the ...

Doradus 30, also known as 30 Doradus or the Tarantula Nebula, is a massive star-forming region located in the Large ...

Hubble’s high-resolution imagery allowed researchers to hone in on more of the Bullseye galaxy’s rings — and helped confirm ...

The halo, known as an Einstein ring, encircles a galaxy 590 million light-years away, considered close by cosmic standards. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles. Telescopes spy a monster radio jet ...

After hundreds of hours of observations, researchers captured a highly detailed image of a long filament of the "cosmic web" ...

Its cosmic corsage tells a story of death and rebirth. Within a few million years — a blink of an eye in the universe’s life — the gas and dust will either become budding young stars and planetary ...