On Oct. 13, 1773, Charles Messier spotted the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) for the first time. Writing of it a few months later, he ...

On Oct. 13, 1773, a French astronomer named Charles Messier discovered the "whirlpool galaxy," also known as Messier 51, or ...

Over the course of human history, perhaps no single object in the night sky has drawn more attention than the Andromeda ...

It would change the universe. For several decades, astronomers had been debating the nature of spiral nebulae—pinwheel-shape objects twirling across the heavens. One view held that the spirals were ...

On Sunday November 23, 1924, 100 years ago this month, readers perusing page six of the New York Times would have found an intriguing article, amid several large adverts for fur coats. The headline ...

Many scientific terms are very specific, but the term nebula is, well, nebulous. In a very generic sense, it simply means a fuzzy thing. But there are a wide variety of astronomical objects that can ...

The two spiral arms winding towards the bright centre might deceive you into thinking you are looking at a galaxy a bit like our Milky Way. But the object starring in this image is of a different ...

Astronomers, maybe more than anyone, appreciate what an island of perfection our Earth is. Our orbit may put us at a perfect distance from the sun for life to flourish, but it is too small to easily ...

Early understandings of the Milky Way, from mythological interpretations to Aristotle's atmospheric explanation, lacked the technological tools for accurate observation and were superseded by the ...

Vesto Slipher first observed that galaxies are moving away from us. Edwin Hubble later showed a relationship between galaxy distance and speed. Hubble's work relied heavily on Slipher's earlier data.