This artist’s conception of a runaway planet illustrates a recent study that found that planets in tight orbits around stars that get ejected from our galaxy might actually be tossed out of the Milky Way at blisteringly fast speeds of up to 30 million miles per hour, which would make them some of the fastest objects in the galaxy. Eventually, such worlds would travel through the lonely intergalactic void.

(David A. Aguilar, CfA)

New NASA videos show how Earth’s moon evolved and provide a look at the latest close-up imagery of its surface.

“This isn’t just a case of upper socioeconomic people being more willing to admit that they would be unethical,” said researcher Paul Piff, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “We actually measure cheating behavior — not just ‘Would you do something unethical’ but ‘Do you do it?’”

The findings beg the question of whether or not unethical behavior is found in the upper class because it helped them get there in the first place.

Scientists launched a small rocket into a northern lights display on Saturday in an attempt to investigate “space weather” by seeing how the northern lights can affect signals from GPS satellites and other spacecraft.

(Photo by Donald Hampton)

A telescope has captured the most detailed image yet of a star nursery called the Carina nebula located deep in the heart of the southern Milky Way.

(ESO/T. Preibisch)

Fifty students participated in a study in which they were asked 120 basic science questions. They also ranked their level of confidence in their answers.

Their answers were often wrong, so they were given the right answers. Then half of the participants took the same test again immediately. The other half waited a week to take the test a second time.

The researchers concluded that the difference in results between the two test-taking groups shows that while were are good at correcting our mistakes in the short term – and even better at correcting information we were previously strongly convinced of – we revert back to deeply held misconceptions as time passes.

Scientists say they’ve discovered the brightest galaxy ever seen through a cosmic “zoom lens.” The galaxy is located about 5 billion light-years away.

Photo: NASA, ESA, J. Rigby (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), K. Sharon (Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago), and M. Gladders and E. Wuyts (University of Chicago)

Previous studies have told us that kids who are raised in nurturing environments tend to do better in school and are more emotionally developed. But now, brain images show us that a mother’s love physically alters the volume of her child’s hippocampus, the region of the brain that’s important for learning, memory and stress responses.

The biggest and strongest solar storm in more than 6 years is hitting Earth right now.

Seriously.