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In 1750, British astronomer Thomas Wright published a book An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe with a diagram showing the stars of our Milky Way, each surrounded by orbiting planets.

But there was no evidence to support his view. "At that point in history," Samuel Arbesman writes in his book The Half-Life of Facts, "this notion was nothing more than a hope, and a somewhat sacrilegious one at that. It was no more than a logical deduction derived from the Copernican notion that our place in the universe need not be a particularly privileged one."

What could be the largest structure yet seen in the observable universe has emerged from data taken during a 12-year survey of the night sky.

The discovery is an apparent cluster of quasars some 4 billion light-years across. If it holds up to further scrutiny, it could challenge a long-held assumption that at the cosmos's largest scales, the physical processes at work and the distribution of matter and energy are the same, regardless of an observer's location.

For decades, scientists have assumed the central portion of California's San Andreas fault acts as a barrier that prevents a big quake in the southern part of the state from spreading to the north, and vice versa. As a result, a mega-quake that could be felt from San Diego to San Francisco was widely considered impossible.

But that key fault segment might not serve as a barrier in all cases, researchers wrote Wednesday in the online edition of the journal Nature.

The awe-inspiring Grand Canyon was probably carved about 70 million years ago, much earlier than thought, a provocative new study suggests - so early that dinosaurs might have roamed near this natural wonder.

Using a new dating tool, a team of scientists came up with a different age for the gorge's western section, challenging conventional wisdom that much of the canyon was scoured by the mighty Colorado River in the last 5 million to 6 million years.

In a world without sunlight, microbes still seem to thrive in an Antarctic lake iced over for at least 2,800 years, biologists report.

Lake Vida, a chilly brine pool covered by more than 50 feet of ice, resides in East Antarctica. Biologists led by Alison Murray of the Desert Research Institute in Reno report that 2005 and 2010 core samples reveal aquatic microbes thrive in its yellowish waters, in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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There’s an orphan planet roaming our galactic neighborhood.

It’s a globe of gas about the size of Jupiter, astronomers say. And it’s out there by its lonesome, untethered to any star, drifting about 100 light-years from Earth. (In astronomical terms, that’s close.)

Astronomers have spied lonely planets before. But this newest object, seen near the southern constellation Dorado, is the closest to Earth yet found.