Written by: Robert Roy Britt (Senior Science Writer for Space.com) A comet that has delighted backyard astronomers in recent weeks after an unexpected eruption has now grown larger than the sun. The sun remains by far the most massive object in the solar system, with an extended influence of particles that reaches all the planets. [...]

Source: Fox News HOUSTON — Space shuttle Discovery and its crew returned to Earth on Wednesday and concluded a 15-day space station build-and-repair mission that was among the most challenging — and heroic — in shuttle history. The space shuttle touched down just after 1 p.m., after safely crossing the continent in the first coast-to-coast [...]

Source: Space.com Written by: Ker Than Scientists announced on Tuesday the discovery of a fifth planet in a distant star system that that now looks like a "cousin" to our own. Known as 55 Cancri, the sun-like star harbors the most number of planets ever discovered outside our solar system. "We now know that our [...]

HOUSTON, Texas (CNN) -- Astronauts stepped outside the international space station Saturday morning to fix a ripped solar wing in one of the most difficult and dangerous spacewalking repairs ever attempted. 1 of 2 NASA officials and the astronauts in orbit have worked day and night to plan every detail of the momentous repair mission. [...]

Sending the space race into full throttle, China announced it will launch its first lunar probe this week, an official told gathered press officials today. The launch will take place sometime between Wednesday and Friday of this week, depending on a variety of factors. A few weeks ago Japan sent its own lunar orbitor into [...]

Source: The switch has been thrown on a telescope specifically designed to seek out alien life. Funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the finished array will have 350 six-metre antennas and will be one of the world's largest. The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) will be able to sweep more than one million star systems for [...]

"Star Trek"/"Heroes" actor and powerful human rights advocate George Takei has been immortalized in the heavens with his name permanently affixed to an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter. Last week the Committee on Small Body Nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union approved the name "7307 Takei" for the asteroid previously labeled "1994 GT9." The Takei [...]

The high-definition video of Earth was processed into this still image. The west coast of South America is visible in the lower right portion of the planet. [Photo Credit: JAXA/NHK]

Scientists locked away in a remote secret laboratory load up a space craft with non to semi-deadly bacteria, viruses and germs of varying toxicity. They blast them off into the great regions of outer space. Eventually, the rocket tumbles into the planet Earth's atmosphere with a cargo of super-charged, lethal, deadly germs out to reap [...]

Virgin Galactic's conceptual mock-up of the SpaceShip interior is still on tour, and has been on exhibit at the National Space Centre, Leicester, in the UK. The exhibt wrapped up yesterday, Wednesday, September 19. Visitors to the Museum were be able see what the interior of SpaceShipTwo might look like, they were also given an [...]

Luke Skywalker's lightsaber is heading for outer space. The actual lightsaber used by Mark Hamill in the very first Star Wars movie will have a special place aboard the Discovery Space Shuttle when it heads into orbit and docks with the International Space Station this coming October. This landmark event is being done as part [...]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A giant hole in the Universe is devoid of galaxies, stars and even lacks dark matter, astronomers said on Thursday. The team at the University of Minnesota said the void is nearly a billion light-years across and they have no idea why it is there. "Not only has no one ever found a [...]

In August of 2006, at the behest of Robert Rutledge of McGill University, a group of astronomers pointed their NASA sponsored Swift X-ray telescope array toward an area of the Milky Way where Rutledge first detected a curious X-ray source. What the scientists found was a lone neutron star in the constellation of Ursa Minor [...]

Written by: Samuel K. Sloan (Farpoint Media Exec. News Dir.) After two weeks of nail-biting concern over whether or not the NASA shuttle Endeavour and its seven-astronaut crew should return to Earth in the damaged Shuttle with Hurricane Dean barrelling down on the Gulf, all those concerns were set aside today at 12:32 PM EDT [...]

On Saturday morning, August 4th, 2007, NASA launched the Phoenix lander to Mars aboard a Delta II rocket. In addition to its payload of eight scientific instruments designed to search for ice in the polar regions of the Red Planet, Phoenix also carries a very special DVD. The DVD, provided by the Planetary Society, has [...]