For the first time since exoplanets, or planets around stars other than the sun, were discovered almost 20 years ago, X-ray observations have detected an exoplanet passing in front of its...

Cambridge, MA NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) observatory has produced its first images and spectra of a little understood region of the Sun through which the energy ...

The vast majority of stars form in clusters of different sizes and stellar population. A significant fraction of these clusters lie in proximity to hottest, massive stars. The energetic r...

Cambridge, MA The sight of a snowfall can thrill children, but the first-ever snow line seen around a distant star gives astronomers an even greater thrill because of what it reveals abo...

Over the past decade, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and other modern, giant telescopes have opened a new era in observational cosmology. By staring for long times at so-called "dark fi...

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An interactive tool to characterize and illustrate the interior structure of exoplanets is now available at http://www.astrozeng.com under the tab Exoplanet Models. This tool is useful fo...

Our Milky Way galaxy has a super-massive black hole at its core, about four million solar-masses in size.

Cambridge, MA The Sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, has posed an enduring mystery. Why is it so hot? The Sun's visible surface is only 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but as you move outward...

As a new star develops within a molecular cloud, a circumstellar disk forms naturally from the rotating gas and dust. These disks are called "protoplanetary disks" because astronomers ex...