Cambridge, MA - When a star explodes as a supernova, it shines brightly for a few weeks or months before fading away. Yet the material blasted outward from the explosion still glows hu...

The universe was created 13.73 billion years ago in a blaze of light: the big bang. Roughly 380,000 years later, after matter (mostly hydrogen) had cooled enough for neutral atoms to fo...

One of the most famous objects in the sky - the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant - will be on display like never before, thanks to NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and a new project from th...

Cambridge, MA - Hopes are high for Comet ISON, which has the potential to become the most spectacular comet seen in years. ISON is speeding through the inner solar system at about 120,...

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 ...