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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has determined the size of the largest icy comet nucleus ever seen by astronomers. The estimated diameter is approximately 80 miles across, making it larger than the state of Rhode Island. The nucleus is about 50 times larger than found at the heart of most known comets. Its mass is estimated to be a staggering 500 trillion tons, a hundred thousand times greater than the mass of a typical comet found much closer to the Sun. The behemoth comet, C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) is barreling this way at 22,000 miles per hour from the edge of the...

SEOUL, April 16 (Yonhap) -- North Korea's attempted missile launch on Sunday ended in failure, South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said.

A good-sized asteroid sailing past our planet right now turns out to be two giant rocks doing a celestial jig. The setup, catalogued as 2008 BT18, was thought to be nearly a half-mile wide after its discovery by MIT's LINEAR search program in January. Nothing else was known about it. Now seen as two objects orbiting each other, the pair will be closest to Earth on July 14, at about 1.4 million miles (2 million kilometers) away. That's nearly six times as far from us as the moon... Radar observations from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico on July 6...

Hale-Bopp they're not, but two comets headed toward Earth are lighting up skywatchers' interest nonetheless. The comets, which were discovered only recently, probably never will come in viewing range again. And they're big enough and close enough to see with bare eyes or just binoculars, a fairly rare event. One, known by the cute name NEAT, already is visible in the evening sky and will make its closest approach to the sun, reaching peak brightness, on Saturday. The second, known as LINEAR, appears in late May. Both will be visible right after sunset during the first part of June. The...