Cambridge, MA In the distant reaches of the universe, almost 13 billion light-years from Earth, a strange species of galaxy lay hidden. Cloaked in dust and dimmed by the intervening dist...

The earliest stages in the life of a star are among the most mysterious. This is primarily because stars form inside dark clouds of material that block optical light, and because they for...

Cambridge, MA The cosmos constantly changes. Stars are born, live out their lives, and die - sometimes calmly, sometimes explosively. Galaxies form, grow, and collide dramatically. A new...

Black holes are among the most amazing and bizarre predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity. A black hole is thought to be point-like in dimension, but it is surrounded by an imaginar...

Cambridge, MA New details about the birth of a famous black hole that took place millions of years ago have been uncovered, thanks to a team of scientists who used data from NASA's Chand...

The path traveled by a light beam will bend in the presence of matter. This remarkable prediction, reached by Einstein in his theory of general relativity, was confirmed by observations o...

Astronomers once thought that the process of star formation was more-or-less controlled by the simple coalescence of material by gravity,leading eventually to a new star. But they have ...

Cambridge, MA In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, astronomers have hunted for radio signals and ultra-short laser pulses. In a new paper, Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Cente...

Complex molecules, including many organic species, exist in a wide range of environments in the cosmos, and are especially abundant in giant molecular clouds of gas and dust where new sta...

The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., has opened its newest temporary exhibition, "The Evolving Universe." Breathtaking full-color photographs of the ...