astronomy

Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are visible to the naked eye in January and for part of February. Uranus and Neptune can only be spotted with binoculars and telescopes.

You may be inclined to see a ravioli, a walnut or an empanada, but it's tough to deny that Pan's distinctive ridge makes a tasty impression. The images were taken by the Cassini spacecraft Thursday.

Black holes aren't all doom and gloom. Some of these incredibly dense matter-suckers fling powerful jets of light and charged particles — the space version of a fireworks show.

As 2016 winds down, we take a moment to contemplate the billions of years that led to 2017 and the billions more yet to come.

Scientists will search the sky Thursday for an undiscovered planet in the outer solar system — they're pretty sure it's out there, and computer models tell them where to look.

The object known for now as 2014 UZ224 is only about 330 miles across and takes 1,100 years to orbit the sun. But one of the most interesting things about it is the way researchers found it.

Blobs in space emitting eerie, unexplained light have been puzzling astronomers for more than 15 years. Now, they think they are on to the cause of the mysterious glow.

Scientists were studying the properties of the light coming from a quasar — one of the brightest objects in the universe — when the light just seemed to wink out. Now they think they know why.

Something very big, out beyond Neptune, is warping the orbits of small, icy objects circling our sun. Astronomers haven't seen it yet, but say the culprit could be a planet with 10 times Earth's mass.

A random search has turned up a dwarf planet orbiting roughly 10 billion miles away. The far-off world is tiny, and probably very, very cold.