Organic molecules have been detected on a planet in another solar system. Organic molecules are necessary for the chemical reactions to form life as we know it.

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered that water is abundant in the universe.

A new web-based project called “Galaxy Zoo” is asking the public to help classify a million galaxies that have been imaged by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Astronomers have known for many years that our galaxy, the Milky Way, and the Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest neighbor, are drifting together and will eventually merge into one big galaxy in a few billi

Before the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, astronomers knew of 11 dwarf galaxies caught in the gravity of the Milky Way galaxy. But cosmologists believed there should be from 10 to 100 times more dwarf galaxies surrounding large galaxies like the Milky Way. The number of dwarf galaxies is increasing as astronomers continue to scan for more dwarfs.

What happens when galaxies collide depends on their sizes and their speeds. A galaxy merger requires only two conditions: the galaxies must be close enough and be moving at a slow enough relative speed to be captured by their mutual gravities. If they pass too quickly, they cannot bind their gravities together. They interact by stripping stars and heating up.

After a year of studying images of a faint reddish speck near a brown dwarf star, a team of astronomers led by Gael Chauvin of the European Southern Observatory has been credited with the first image of a planet outside of our solar system.

A team of astronomers from New York University led by Beth Willman has discovered the Milky Way’s 13th satellite galaxy located in the direction of Ursa Major, (the Big Bear). It’s located about 6 degrees southwest of the cup of the Big Dipper.