Are you sitting comfortably?

Around one billion stars in the Milky Way can be seen together for the first time in an image captured over a decade by astronomers.

The ultimate total-theatre show comes to the Young Vic

The sight of a flaming meteor shooting across the night sky – and sparking fears a passenger aircraft was about to crash – has kicked off a treasure hunt for secrets about the birth of the Earth.

The sight of this meteor shooting across the night sky sparked fears that a passenger jet was about to crash – then triggered a treasure hunt.

"They lapsed into sullen silence, each knowing that, if certain words were said, it would be like leaving the comparative safety of a muddy trench at Ypres and going over the top to the carnage of the battle field." You can see the dazzling brilliance of that sentence, whatever emotional viewpoint you are squinting from.

With the Patrick Moore Planetarium in Leicester inspiring a new generation of stargazers, Aaron Miller finds ways to let you get close to the wonders of our cosmos

Stephen Hawking is a "genius of Nobel Prize calibre" who has done more to popularise physics than anybody else, Professor Brian Cox said.

With Comet Lovejoy being little more than a giant snowball, scientists held out little hope for it when it flew close to the Sun, whose outer surface temperatures can reach 6,000C. It had, so the theory went, a snowball's chance in hell.

Nasa has found a new planet outside Earth's solar system that is eerily similar in important aspects.

From volcanoes and ancient forests to the stars in the night sky, there's plenty to lure adventurous families to the steep little island of La Palma.