Exoplanets - worlds orbiting distant suns - are very, very far away. Astronomers are learning what some might look like, and what's in their atmospheres. Soon - for the first time - a new telescope will be able to "see inside" some exoplanets.

The Cassini mission to Saturn is over, but scientists still pore over its data. The newest discovery is of organic compounds - the ingredients of amino acids, the building blocks of life - in water vapor plumes from Saturn's moon Enceladus.

Scientists working with the Curiosity rover have found salt-enriched rock at a place called Sutton Island on Mars. The rocks suggest ponds with briny water on Mars, billions of years ago.

Astronomers have found 20 new moons orbiting Saturn, bringing the planet's total number of moons to 82. That surpasses Jupiter, which has 79.

The discovery of exoplanet GJ 3512b - a planet "too big for its star" - adds fuel to the competition between 2 theoretical models of how planets form. It suggests many more Jupiter-like planets are waiting to be found, orbiting nearby sunlike stars.

Maps of the long filaments of gas that hold the universe together might one day help trace and unveil dark matter.

Researchers have found evidence of a cataclysmic flare that punched outward in both directions from our galaxy's center, reaching so far into intergalactic space that its impact was felt 200,000 light-years away.

"The Milky Way is on a collision course with Andromeda in about 4 billion years. So knowing what kind of a monster our galaxy is up against is useful in finding out the Milky Way's ultimate fate."

Astronomers probed the cosmic web, a large-scale structure composed of massive filaments of galaxies separated by giant voids. They found the filaments also contained significant amounts of gas, believed to help fuel the galaxies' growth.

NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter has now successfully executed a 10.5-hour propulsive maneuver. It'll keep Juno - a solar-powered spacecraft - out of a mission-ending shadow due to have been cast by Jupiter onto the craft in November.