What better way to end than with some examples of said beauty and utility? After all that reading, we'll leave you with a few glamour shots of our favorite nebula: Messier 16, better known as the ...

The Universe really seems to be expanding fast. Too fast, even. A new measurement confirms what previous -- and highly debated -- results had shown: The Universe is expanding faster than predicted by ...

In the years following the launch of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have tallied over 1 trillion galaxies in the universe. But only one galaxy stands out as the most important nearby ...

Astronomers are celebrating the completion of a 2.5-billion-pixel panoramic picture of the entire Andromeda Galaxy. The team includes several UC Santa Cruz researchers who made significant ...

A little-known chapter of the Hubble Space Telescope’s history is a reminder of the risks of looking at the sun ...

How do images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) appear so colorful, and where do the colors come from?

For humans, the most important star in the universe is our Sun. The second-most important star is nestled inside the ...

The next great space telescope will study distant galaxies and faraway planets from an orbital outpost about a million miles ...