Europe's Gaia satellite has produced a "stunning" 3-D map, published Wednesday, of more than a billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, complete with their distance from Earth, their color, and their motion through space.

A car-sized asteroid that exploded in Earth's atmosphere in 2008, raining down diamond-bearing rocks, was a fragment of a Solar System planet that existed billions of years ago, researchers said Tuesday.

A relaxing soak in a hot tub is a time-honoured stress reliever but the advantages are not confined to humans -- with monkeys also benefiting from spa time, researchers in Japan say.

A defunct Chinese space lab disintegrated under intense heat as it hurtled through Earth's atmosphere Monday and plunged to a watery grave in the South Pacific, Chinese officials said.

India's national space agency has lost contact with a satellite days after it was launched into orbit with much fanfare, authorities said Sunday. 

The launch of NASA's next giant space telescope has been delayed until at least May 2020, the US space agency said Tuesday, in the latest setback for the much-anticipated project.

Yuri Gagarin, feted as a Soviet national hero for being the first man in space, was killed in a plane crash 50 years ago but the details of his death remain shrouded in mystery.

An ultra-fine biodegradable film some 50,000 times thinner than a human hair could be enlisted to protect the Great Barrier Reef from environmental degradation, researchers said Tuesday.

Stephen Hawking's ashes will be buried near the graves of fellow British scientists Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin at Westminster Abbey, it was announced Tuesday.

China has announced it is building the world's fastest wind tunnel to develop a new generation of super-fast airplanes, but it could also be used for hypersonic missile technology.