The death of a massive star in a distant galaxy 10 billion years ago created a rare superluminous supernova, one of the most distant ever discovered. The brilliant explosion, more than three times as bright as the 100 billion stars of our Milky Way galaxy combined, occurred about 3.5 billion years after the big bang at a period known as 'cosmic high noon,' when the rate of star formation in the universe reached its peak.

In the lead-up to a total solar eclipse, most of the attention is on the sun, but Earth's moon also has a starring role.

A web that passes through infinite intergalactic spaces, a dense cosmic forest illuminated by very distant lights and a huge enigma to solve. These are the picturesque ingredients of a scientific research that adds an important element for understanding one of the fundamental components of our Universe: dark matter.

Engineers say a method called digital holographic microscopy could be used to detect living microbes in space.

It was midafternoon, but it was dark in an area in Boulder, Colorado on Aug. 3, 1998. A thick cloud appeared overhead and dimmed the land below for more than 30 minutes. Well-calibrated radiometers showed that there were very low levels of light reaching the ground, sufficiently low that researchers decided to simulate this interesting event with computer models. Now in 2017, inspired by the event in Boulder, NASA scientists will explore the moon's eclipse of the sun to learn more about Earth's energy system.

The international Spitzer Adaptation of the Red-sequence Cluster Survey (SpARCS) collaboration has combined observations from several of the world's most powerful telescopes to carry out one of the largest studies yet of molecular gas -- the raw material which fuels star formation throughout the universe -- in three of the most distant clusters of galaxies ever found, detected as they appeared when the universe was only four billion years old.

While photographing Mars, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured a cameo appearance of the tiny moon Phobos on its trek around the Red Planet. Hubble took 13 separate exposures over 22 minutes to create a time-lapse video showing the moon's orbital path.

Astronomers have provided a way for armchair astronomers, and even primary school children, to merely look at a spiral galaxy and estimate the mass of its hidden, central black hole.

Scientists have untangled the competing influences of water and gravity on plant roots -- by growing cucumbers during spaceflight.

Are density distributions of the vast universe and the nature of smallest particles related? Scientists have now revealed the connection between those two aspects, and argued that our universe could be used as a particle physics 'collider' to study the high energy particle physics. Their findings mark the first step of cosmological collider phenomenology and pave the way for future discovery of new physics unknown yet to humankind.

The center of our Milky Way contains a 'trap' that concentrates some of the highest-energy cosmic rays, among the fastest particles in the galaxy, a combined analysis of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the High Energy Stereoscopic System, a ground-based observatory in Namibia, suggests.

By using supercomputers such as the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's Titan, a large multidisciplinary team of scientists developed a new integrated climate model designed to reduce uncertainties in future climate predictions as it bridges Earth systems with energy and economic models and large-scale human impact data.

A colossal impact with a large asteroid early in Mars' history may have ripped off a chunk of the northern hemisphere and left behind a legacy of metallic elements in the planet's interior. The crash also created a ring of rocky debris around Mars that may have later clumped together to form its moons, Phobos and Deimos.

Nothing works without fuel: plants also depend on fuel for growth and development. In living organisms, fuel comes as the universal energy currency adenosine triphosphate (ATP). An international team of researchers shows how ATP behaves in the different parts of living seedlings and the impact of stress on their fuel status. The results could inform breeding of more resistant crop varieties.

The Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer, or NICER, payload completed commissioning and calibration and all systems are working as expected.

Researchers have discovered a new 'Hot Jupiter' exoplanet.

The microgravity conditions of the International Space Station (ISS) may hold the key to improving our understanding of how to combat toxic nerve agents such as sarin and VX.

One night three months ago, Rosa Castro finished her dinner, opened her laptop, and uncovered a novel object that was neither planet nor star. Therapist by day and amateur astronomer by night, Castro joined the NASA-funded Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 citizen science project when it began in February -- not knowing she would become one of four volunteers to help identify the project's first brown dwarf, formally known as WISEA J110125.95+540052.8.

Engineers have dispelled a 100-year-old scientific law used to describe how fluid flows through rocks. The discovery could lead to a range of improvements including advances in Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). This is where industrial emissions will be captured by CCS technology, before reaching the atmosphere, and safely stored in rock deep underground.

NASA's Van Allen Probes have observed a new population of space sound waves, called plasmaspheric hiss, which are important in removing high-energy particles from around Earth that can damage satellites.

Discovered by British astronomer William Herschel over 200 years ago, NGC 2500 lies about 30 million light-years away in the northern constellation of Lynx. NGC 2500 is a particular kind of spiral galaxy known as a barred spiral, its wispy arms swirling out from a bright, elongated core. 

Thanks to an amplified image produced by a gravitational lens, and the Gran Telescopio CANARIAS, a team of scientists has discovered one of the brightest galaxies known from the epoch when the universe had 20 percent of its present age.

Our solar system is located in the outer regions of the Milky Way, a disk-shaped galaxy with an approximate diameter of 100,000 light years. From Earth, its appearance can only be observed indirectly, by measuring positions and movements of stars and gas clouds. In addition to luminous stars, a substantial portion of the visible matter in our Milky Way is interstellar gas. Gas clouds in the so-called central molecular zone (CMZ) -- the innermost 1,500 light years of the Milky Way -- move on an elliptical central disk that has two spiral arms. A comprehensive model has now been used to simulate this motion.

The Sun is a solar-type star, a new study claims -- resolving an ongoing controversy about whether the star at the center of our Solar System exhibits the same cyclic behavior as other nearby, solar-type stars.

Spiral galaxies are found to be strongly rotating, with an angular momentum higher by a factor of about 5 than ellipticals. In a new study, the researchers have traced back the dichotomy in the angular momentum of spiral and elliptical galaxies to their different formation history. In particular, the low angular momentum of ellipticals is mainly originated by nature in the central regions during the early galaxy formation process.