Astronomers estimate that once the Sun began to shine it took the Earth another 50-100 million years to grow to its present size, as the solar system evolved. But how did the Earth get st...

In this holiday season of home cooking and carefully-honed recipes, some astronomers are asking: what is the best mix of ingredients for stars to make the largest number of plump black ho...

Ten billion years ago or so, at least according to the current picture, the youthful universe began to produce an abundance of new stars. The very first ones appeared in the young cosmos ...

There are currently 851 confirmed extra-solar planets. Of these, 289 were detected because their orbits (as seen from Earth) take them across the face of their host star, dimming the star...

The Milky Way and other galaxies in the universe harbor many young star clusters and associations that each contain hundreds to thousands of hot, massive, young stars known as O and B sta...

The space between stars is not empty. It contains copious but diffuse amounts of gas and dust; in fact about 5-10% of the total mass of our Milky Way galaxy is in interstellar gas. About ...

The most massive galaxies in the universe (as far as astronomers know) contain about five hundred billion solar-masses of material; our Milky Way galaxy, for comparison, has a total mass ...

Cambridge, MA One of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way almost got away with theft. However, new simulations convicted the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) of stealing stars from its neig...

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 light with extremely high ...

Scientists at the University of Arizona and in California have completed the most challenging large astronomical mirror ever made. For the past several years, a group of optical scientis...