Private space exploration is coming to the Moon, and soon. The world's first mission to the Moon's sunny South Pole will put a private telescope on a the lunar peak Malapert Mountain as early as 2015.

Astronomers have discovered a new type of pulsing star. There are 36 of the new type, located in a cluster about 7,000 light-years away from Earth.

A team of scientists working at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii has solved one of the vital inconsistencies in the Big Bang theory, reconciling observed data with our current theoretical models of how the birth of the universe went down 13.8 billion years ago. The discovery was published in the June 6 edition of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

It looks like the IceCube Observatory neutrino detector at the South Pole has found what it was looking for just two years after opening.

Inside the European Southern Observatory's Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope in Chile, there's a submillimetre-wavelength camera perfectly tuned to peer through the clouds of interstellar dust and gas that obscure our view of what's going on elsewhere in the universe. Fortunately for us, the camera is also good at picking up the faint glow given off by those very same grains of dust, at wavelengths too long for human eyes to see. The result: images like this one a "fiery ribbon" (that's how astronomers are describing it) stretching across a segment of the Orion Nebula some 1,350 light-years away.

A new radio telescope that can hear the faintest heartbeats in the universe - colder and farther back in time than anything to come before it - is about to be officially switched on in the Chilean Andes. The Atacama Large-Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array, or ALMA, is the grandest ground-based observatory ever built.