Centaurus A: NGC 5128 is a galaxy in constellation Centaurus, discovered in 1826 by Scottish astronomer James Dunlop. Messier ...

Set against a backdrop littered with tiny pinpricks of light glint a few, brighter stars, this is NGC 1858, a 10-million-year ...

It takes dark skies to find without aid, but the Dark Horse Nebula can be seen prancing across the sprawl of the Milky Way. Credit: John Chumack There are many bright nebulae and star clusters in ...

At least 50 billion planets in our own Milky Way galaxy are likely to be free ... like the original star cluster in which our own solar system formed. But early such clusters are tumultuous ...

Somewhere in between, humans realized the universe is much larger than our Milky Way — that the spiral nebulas visible through telescopes were, in fact, other galaxies in their own right.

Shapley suspected the spiral nebulas to simply be ... Shapley determined that the Milky Way was 300,000 light years across, and that our solar system was 50,000 light-years from the center.

Our solar system resides in a galaxy called the Milky Way, stuffed with between 100 billion and 400 billion other stars, many of them with planets of their own. The Milky Way got its name from the ...

Sometimes, if the night is dark and clear enough, you can look up and see the Milky Way in its ... brought about the birth of ...

Astronomers have spotted the shiniest known planet in the Milky Way, and it has metal clouds ... only bounces back 30% of its sunlight. Venus, the solar system's shiniest planet, reflects 75% ...

This collage highlights a small selection of regions of the Milky Way imaged as part of the most ... and the closest brown dwarfs to the solar system. Brown dwarfs are intermediate objects ...

Solar System ... the centre of the Milky Way galaxy at about 515,000 mph. Scientists believe that the Sun has been formed from a moving cloud of gases, which is called Nebula.