The largest spiral galaxy known to astronomers is Malin 1. Its disk of stars measures 650,000 light-years across, several times the diameter of the disk of our Milky Way galaxy. In 2007, a newly found image from the Hubble Space Telescope revealed that the central part of Malin 1 looks like an ordinary barred spiral galaxy, somewhat like our Milky Way.

On Oct. 11, 2006, astronomers witnessed a stellar outburst. It was labeled Supernova (SN) 2006jc. This same star had undergone a mysterious outburst two years earlier.

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Early stargazers named Neptune for the god of the sea. Now the possibility exists for Neptune to have an ocean of its own ... someday. Astronomers say our sun will become a faint white dwarf star some 8 billion years from now. Then Neptune will cool, possibly causing rain to fall from Neptune's clouds - which might create a water layer, or ocean, up in Neptune's thick atmosphere.

The Webby Awards, the leading international honor for the Web, recognized EarthSky Communications as a Webby Honoree in the Science Category.

I've watched the global warming story unfold throughout my 30-year career in science journalism. For decades, scientists tried to be careful and conservative about this issue. Too careful and too conservative, I see now.

Here's news about the most famous stellar nursery of all, the Orion Nebula. Previously, the distance to the Orion Nebula was estimated at about 1,500 or 1,600 light-years. But the Orion Nebula is actually closer than that by about 200 light-years, according to Rob Jeffries at Keele University in England.

... but that liquid isn't water. The lakes can't hold water because Titan is so far from the sun that any water on its surface would be solid ice. Instead of having liquid water, Titan's lakes are thought to be filled with methane in a liquid form.

It seems obvious there's economic value in nature's raw potential for goods. But nature has other, perhaps less obvious, economic value, said economist Scott Barrett.

Wolf 359 is one of the closest stars to Earth at only 7.8 light-years away. It is a red dwarf star, known to be a single star. Former studies of bright, easy-to-see stars indicated that most of them lie in multiple systems of two or three stars. But those earlier studies neglected small, faint stars like Wolf 359.