Cambridge, MA For many movie stars, their age is a well-kept secret. In space, the same is true of the actual stars. Like our Sun, most stars look almost the same for most of their lives...

Black holes, one of the most amazing and bizarre predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity, are irresistible sinks for matter and energy. They are so dense that not even light can escap...

The Great Nebula in the constellation of Carina is a massive star-forming complex located about 7.5 thousand light-years away. The main star in the complex, Eta Carinae, shines brightly ...

The most challenging problem facing astronomers today is that 96 percent ofour universe is missing. Everything astronomers have ever seen comprises only 4 percent of what's out there. The...

Cambridge, MA As part of its Discovery Program, NASA has selected three potential missions for 2016 that would look at Mars' interior for the first time; study an extraterrestrial ocean ...

The "Dark Ages" of the universe started about 400,000 years after the big bang, after matter cooled down enough for neutral atoms to form. This epoch lasted roughly a billion years, until...

(Written by Christine Pulliam, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, for Science at the Smithsonian, a website featuring highlights of scientific research at the Smithsonian Institution....

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When a star like our sun gets to be very old, after another seven billion years or so, it will no longer be able to sustain burning its nuclear fuel. With only about half of the its mass ...

Interstellar space contains vast quantities of dust that obscures our view while helping to catalyze the chemical reactions that turn atomic gases into complex molecular species. Most dus...