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...

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...

Multiple stars - binaries, triplets, or perhaps more stars, that orbit each other - are unique laboratories into the interactions between stars and their early environments. Young stars ...

Astronomers love Tucson and Tucson loves astronomers. The city is ringed by craggy mountain peaks topped by observatories, including Kitts Peak, Mt. Hopkins, and Mt. Graham. Astronomers s...

Cambridge, MA One trillion years from now, an alien astronomer in our galaxy will have a difficult time figuring out how the universe began. They won't have the evidence that we enjoy to...