A "super-Earth" is an exoplanet (a planet around another star) whose mass is between about two and ten Earth-masses. Planets larger than this are closer to Uranus and Neptune in size (an...

An ultra-luminous X-ray source (ULX) emits more radiation in the X-rays than do a million suns at all wavelengths. ULXs are rare: Most galaxies, including our own Milky Way, have none, a...

Cambridge, MA Our solar system contains three types of planets: rocky, terrestrial worlds (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars), gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn), and ice giants (Uranus and N...

The formation and development of the solar system, long a topic of study for philosophers and scientists, is today often used as a case study for the formation and development of planetar...

Cambridge, MA Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found a cluster of young, blue stars encircling the first intermediate-mass black hole ever discovered. The presence of...

A protoplanetary disk is a rotating disk of gas and dust around a newborn star. Astronomers think that after a few million years, planets will develop out of such protoplanetary disks whe...

One of the most bizarre predictions of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity is the existence of back holes, objects that are so dense that not even light can escape from their gravitat...

Vital clues about the devastating ends to the lives of massive stars can be found by studying the aftermath of their explosions. In its more than twelve years of science operations, NASA'...

It has long been recognized that galaxy mergers or even close interactions can play a vital role in shaping the morphology of galaxies. One way they can do so, it is thought, is by trigg...

Stars form as gravity coalesces the gas and dust in interstellar clouds until the material produces clumps dense enough to become stars. But precisely how this happens, and whether or not...