NASA's new planet-hunting spacecraft, launched seven months ago, has a few noisy detectors that make the stars under study appear to flicker. It's a problem the mission team knew about — and decided not to repair before sending the craft irretrievably into space.

When NASA's Messenger spacecraft zipped past the innermost planet for a third and final flyby on September 29th, a glitch caused half of the planned observations to be lost. Scientists are thrilled to have the other half — but they're not entirely sure what to make of them.

NASA scientists haven't said much since a spacecraft and its carrier rocket slammed into a lunar crater on October 9th. One reason might be that they can't believe what they're finding there.

A new analysis showing a cloud of high-energy particles hovering around the center of the Milky Way could be the signature of dark matter and evidence of a “dark force”, but not everyone is convinced.

A gamma-ray burst seen to occur last April happened in the era of the earliest stars, when the universe was only 630 million years old and the "reionization era" was getting under way. But this news isn't exactly news.

As if this island nation hasn't been troubled enough by recent earthquakes, impact specialists confirm that a cosmic "bomb" — likely the most powerful in 15 years — exploded noisily (but harmlessly) over one of its provinces on October 8th.

Surprising advances in radio astronomy have put astronomers within reach of imaging the supermassive black hole in the Milky Way and the active galaxy M87.

Stefan Seip, who shot the cover photo for SkyWatch 2010, is one of the world's leading astrophotographers.

What do you do when a wildfire threatens to engulf your observatory? In the latest episode of The Universe in Mind podcast Hal McAllister tells the story of the battle to save Mt. Wilson. Author Marcia Bartusiak puts the famous observatory in context with her new book about the discovery of the modern universe.

Early this month astronomers made the first serious attempt to record the passage of a Kuiper Belt object in front of a star. Here's the story of Boston-area amateur Bruce Berger's trip to an observatory in Mexico to capture this historic event.

Thirty new extrasolar planets are announced, including more super-Earths and some that orbit low-metallicity stars.

In case you haven't heard, there's a rumor going around that the world will end on December 21, 2012. Did the Mayans really predict the world would end then? Is the astronomy for real? Do we have anything to worry about? Not surprisingly, the answers are "no," "no," and "of course not."

A globetrotting mascot gets a behind-the-scenes tour of the world's largest single-dish radio telescope.

We've added updates our story on the Moon probe that NASA hoped would raise a big dust-and-vapor splash. The debris plume has indeed been seen. But how much information can be extracted from it?