"We thought they were basically all going to be fried because the entire universe turned into a vat of boiling oil." ...

In 1920, astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis held a Great Debate. Shapley argued that the spiral nebulae were small and in the Milky Way, while Curtis took a more radical position that they ...

Our Solar System is in motion and cruises at about 200 kilometres per second relative to the center of the Milky Way.

This image shows the center of the Milky Way galaxy in infrared light, as seen by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The image reveals the details of the galactic core, where a supermassive black hole ...

Millions of years ago, our Solar System traveled through a densely populated galactic region and was exposed to increased interstellar dust.

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Astronomers using ...

From supermassive black holes to vibrant star clusters and nebulae, check out these 7 mesmerizing cosmic images captured by ...

Some were gaseous, star-forming regions, such as the Orion nebula ... were all moving away from the Milky Way. Hubble’s results suggested the farther away a galaxy was, the faster it was ...

Some of Andromeda's dwarf galaxies are particularly puzzling, though. Dwarf galaxies around the Milky Way, for example, ...

But what of smaller astronomical bodies, like the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf satellite galaxy that is expected to collide with the Milky Way in 2.4 billion years? Nobody is quite sure whether ...

Star clusters are formed when gravity pulls young stars together, forcing them to orbit each other. A star cluster can ...