Cambridge, MA Until now, supernovas came in two main "flavors." A core-collapse supernova is the explosion of a star about 10 to 100 times as massive as our sun, while a Type Ia supernov...

Sometimes, science fiction is also science fact. Katherine Wyman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), began her Thursday night discussion, "Dark Cloud Encounters," by...

Galaxies today come very roughly in two types: reddish, elliptically shaped collections of older stars, and bluer, spiral shaped objects dominated by young stars. The conventional wisdom ...

The Sun glows with a surface temperature of about 5500 degrees Celsius. Meanwhile its hot outer layer (the corona) has a temperature of over a million degrees, and ejects a wind of charge...

In 2015, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will encounter the binary planet Pluto-Charon and its coterie of small satellites. Discovered in June 2005, the satellites Nix and Hydra orbit Plut...

Cambridge, MA The star Eta Carinae is ready to blow. 170 years ago, this 100-solar-mass object belched out several suns' worth of gas in an eruption that made it the second-brightest sta...

IRAS 16293-2922B is a very young star - a protostar - perhaps only about ten thousand years old. Slightly smaller in mass than our Sun, it is still deeply embedded in its surrounding nat...

There are currently 861 exoplanets (planets around other stars) according to the official exoplanet encyclopedia website. This list includes only the objects that have been confirmed as e...

Cambridge, MA Imagine a sphere more than 2 million miles across - eight times the distance from Earth to the Moon - spinning so fast that its surface is traveling at nearly the speed of ...

(The following article appeared in the Winter 2013 GMT Newsletter.)Bringing the universe into focus