Baby stars can grow to an incredibly large size — 10 times more massive than the sun, at the least — if they are cocooned in a group of older stars feeding gas to the youngsters, a new study suggests. This theory could explain how young stars get so big, rather than pushing away gas as they grow and starving themselves once they get about eight times as massive as the sun. Researchers spotted evidence of this type of "convergent...

The FBI says its most viewed public record is a memo from 1950 recounting a strange story someone told an agent about three "flying saucers" that were allegedly recovered in New Mexico. The so-called was first released in the late 1970s under the Freedom of Information Act, but it's been viewed nearly a million times since 2011, when the FBI launched an online database of public records called the Vault. Dated March 22, 1950, the memo was addressed to FBI...

The Universe in Color Throughout the month of March, Robert Gendler's astrophotographs are on display at Grumpy Bert gallery in Brooklyn. (Miriam Kramer/SPACE.com) NEW YORK -- An astrophotographer who has snapped images of the cosmos from a driveway in Connecticut is taking center stage in a Brooklyn space art exhibit. Robert Gendler has loved snapping for years. What started off as a vague childhood interest in the cosmos has become a hobby that Gendler has carried with him through most...

This image provided by NASA-TV shows the view from the Soyuz capsule as it approaches the International Space Station on Thursday, March 28, 2013. (AP Photo/NASA) MOSCOW -- A Soyuz capsule carrying three astronauts successfully docked Friday with the International Space Station, bringing the size of the crew at the orbiting lab to six. Chris Cassidy of the United States and Russians Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin traveled six hours in the capsule before linking up with the space station's...

This illustration of a bright comet over Mars was created by artist Kim Poor. (Kim Poor) A close encounter between Mars and Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) in 2014 is creating both opportunity and anxiety in scientific circles. Scientists are in the early stages of assembling a comet-watching campaign that uses a spacecraft currently orbiting the Red Planet, as well as rovers on the Martian surface. Scientists are also investigating what techniques could be used to prevent cometary debris from...

This green meteorite that landed in Morocco in 2012 could be from Mercury. (Stefan Ralew/sr-meteorites.de ) Scientists may have discovered the first meteorite from Mercury. The green rock found in Morocco last year may be the first known visitor from the solar system's innermost planet, according to meteorite scientist Anthony Irving, who unveiled the new findings this month at the 44th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. The study suggests that a space rock called NWA...

European Space Agency's INTEGRAL satellite project reveals a black hole that had been slumbering for years chomping on a giant, low-mass object that had come too close. (ESA) Astrophysicists have witnessed the rare event of a black hole awakening from its slumber to snack on a planet-sized object in a galaxy 47 million light years away, the University of Geneva said Tuesday. The observation made using the European Space Agency's INTEGRAL satellite project, revealed a black hole that had been...

A privately built rocket reached its highest altitude and traveled its longest distance to date in a demonstration last week for NASA officials at the Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, Calif., according to a news release. In development for about two years, the Xombie suborbital rocket built by Masten Space Systems was airborn for some 80 seconds during the test flight, according to spaceref.com. The rocket was controlled by Charles Stark Draper Laboratory's Guidance Embedded Navigator Integregration Environment...

The internal structure of a human immune cellis seen in this image taken in simulated gravity inside the Kubik centrifuge on the International Space Station. (European Space Agency) Astronaut photos of Earth from space are undeniably amazing, but snapshots of inner space — particularly human cells — can be spectacular, too. A new photo of human cells in space taken on the International Space Station looks more like art than science. The image, titled "Goldfinger" by scientists, reveals a monocyte...

This artist's rendering provided by NASA shows the positions of the sun, Earth and Mars, at left. Radio communications between Earth and Mars are limited during this planetary alignment, which occurs in April. (AP Photo/NASA/JPL-Caltech) LOS ANGELES -- It's the Martian version of spring break: Curiosity and Opportunity, along with their spacecraft friends circling overhead, will take it easy this month because of the sun's interference. For much of April, the sun blocks the line of sight between Earth and...

A billion cosmic ray detector on the International Space Station has found the footprint of something that could be dark matter, the mysterious substance that is believed to hold the cosmos together but has never been directly observed, scientists say. (AP Photo/NASA/European Space Agency ESA. Keystone) GENEVA -- It is one of the cosmos' most mysterious unsolved cases: dark matter. It is supposedly what holds the universe together. We can't see it, but scientists are pretty sure it's out there....

Powerful new computer simulations like this one are allowing astronomers to understand how spiral arms in galaxies form and survive. These simulations suggest that the arms arise as a result of the influence of giant molecular clouds. (Thiago Ize & Chris Johnson (Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute ) New supercomputer simulations show how spiral galaxies like the Milky Way get, and keep, their skinny, star-studded arms. Spiral galaxies are quite common in the universe. We live in one and 70...