The Oort cloud is a vast, spherical region of space thought to surround the Sun, with a radius measured in thousands of astronomical units (1 AU being the Earth-Sun distance). Evidence for it comes from the orbits of long-period comets, which seem to...

Artwork of a galaxy surrounded by stellar streams. Streams are elongated, looping structures made from stars and gas. They result when a smaller galaxy passes a more massive one and becomes torn apart by tidal forces....

Artwork of a galaxy surrounded by stellar streams. Streams are elongated, looping structures made from stars and gas. They result when a smaller galaxy passes a more massive one and becomes torn apart by tidal forces....

This is an impression of a hypothetical Earth-type planet in the vicinity of Barnard 33, also known as. the Horsehead Nebula because, well, it looks like a horse's head. At least that's what people claim. So what you're seeing here is a cloud of gas ...

Animation of a flight into a dense cloud of dust within a bright emission nebula. Emission nebulae glow pink due to ionisation of the hydrogen gas they contain by the radiation from hot young stars recently born within them. The densest regions of ga...

... - the aftermath of a collision between two planets. The collision caused the two bodies to merge into a giant, donut-shaped cloud of hat gas and dust called a synestia (background). Debris from the impact is seen in the foreground. ...

... s emitted from these accretion discs give away the black hole although it cannot itself be seen. But in the Large Magellanic Cloud is a star system called VFTS 243. There is a visible star of type O which is 160,000 times more luminous than the Sun a ...

... ose with unusually bright central regions, the black hole is probably feeding off a vast accretion disc - a donut-shaped gas cloud. The gas in the disc spirals around and is heated to extremely high temperatures by friction, before falling into the h ...