Black holes can come in a wide range of masses. Some, with only about one solar mass, result from the supernova death of a massive star, while those at the center of galaxies (called supe...

Cambridge, MA When it comes to scary things in the universe, it's hard to get much scarier than supermassive black holes. These gigantic, invisible menaces lurk in the centers of galaxie...

Quasars are thought to be galaxies whose bright nuclei contain massive black holes around which disks are actively accreting matter. The accretion process releases vast amounts of energy,...

Become an astronomer for a day! Enjoy telescope tours, interactive multimedia exhibits, hands-on activities, live demonstrations, and our ever-popular Scientist Cafe, where visitors can c...

Professor David Charbonneau has won the Sackler Prize in Physics for 2012. This award recognizes Charbonneau's seminal contributions to our understanding of extra-solar planets. The Raym...

Seyfert galaxies are similar to normal galaxies like our own Milky Way except in one critical respect: their nuclei are fantastically bright, in extreme instances as luminous as 100 bill...

Professor Avi Loeb has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The Academy is one of the nation's most prestigious honorary societies and a leading center fo...

Cambridge, MA New research suggests that billions of stars in our galaxy have captured rogue planets that once roamed interstellar space. The nomad worlds, which were kicked out of the s...

A spectacular eruption at the edge of the solar disk was captured by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument aboard NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) on April 16, 2012. ...

Cambridge, MA For the last 1000 days the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC), aboard NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, has been operating continuously to probe the universe from its most distant ...