Cambridge, MA - How many Earth-like planets are in our galaxy? Scientists have asked that question for hundreds of years. Thanks to data from the Kepler spacecraft, we're starting to f...

The first stars in the Universe are believed to have formed only a few hundred million years after the big bang, about 13.7 billion years ago. They heated and ionized the pristine interga...

The early stages of a star's life are critical both for the star and for any future planets that might develop around it. The process of star formation, once thought to involve just the ...

The Earth's axis of rotation is tilted 23.4 degrees to its orbital motion around the Sun (more precisely, its spin axis has a tilt of 23.4 degrees with respect to the axis of its orbit). ...

In the spirit of Halloween, scientists are releasing a trio of stellar ghosts caught in infrared light by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. All three spooky structures, called planetary neb...

Cambridge, MA - Kepler-78b is a planet that shouldn't exist. This scorching lava world circles its star every eight and a half hours at a distance of less than one million miles - one ...

About thirteen billion years ago the newborn universe began to produce stars. The first ones appeared only a few hundred million years after the big bang, but they were unlike stars of to...

A blazar is a galaxy with an intensely bright central nucleus containing a supermassive black hole, much like a quasar. The difference is that a blazar can emit extremely high energy gamm...

Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) are among those drafting the target list for NASA's next planet-finding telescope, the orbiting Transiting Exoplanet Su...

Near Earth Objects (NEOs) are asteroids or comets whose orbits sometimes bring them close to the earth's orbit. An NEO could therefore someday collide with the Earth -- giving them consid...