This breeding ground for new stars, captured as never before by the Hubble Space Telescope, is in the heart of the Tarantula nebula some 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud – a small satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way.

The UK's night skies are still "saturated" with light pollution, campaigners warned today after a survey suggested half the population cannot see many stars.

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.

1. Astronomy Now

Shock waves from comets bombarding the Earth may have helped to build proteins and set the stage for life, scientists have learned.

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.

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

It might be six months before we know who has emerged victorious from the so-called Battle of the Oligarchs, but the biggest private litigation in English legal history has already produced a lengthy list of winners.

A crippled Russian spacecraft is likely to crash to Earth sometime on Sunday at an unspecified location.

Time will never be the same again if the international organisation responsible for setting the world's clocks votes later this month in favour of a controversial plan to abolish the "leap" second – the extra second added to the time signal once every few years.

China has released plans for a five-year space programme, including building a space station and manned missions.

Residents of the remote Russian village of Vagaitsevo were surprised when debris from a satellite that had failed to launch properly crashed in their community, hitting a house on Cosmonaut Street.

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.