What better way to end than with some examples of said beauty and utility? After all that reading, we'll leave you with a few glamour shots of our favorite nebula: Messier 16, better known as the ...

An object eight times the mass of Jupiter may have swooped around the sun, coming superclose to Mars' present-day orbit ...

We can judge the value of any scientific endeavour based on how much of our knowledge it overturns or transforms.