Seattle, WA In the outer reaches of our solar system lies a mysterious region far more remote and difficult to explore than the Australian outback. It remains the only part of our solar ...

There are now about fifty stars known with more than one orbiting planet - they are the exoplanetary equivalents of the solar system. These stellar families are critical to astronomers pi...

Cambridge, MA As of January 1, 2011, the MMT Observatory, a joint venture of the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Arizona, is under new leadership. Grant Williams, who has s...

Cambridge, MA During a total eclipse of the Sun, skywatchers are awed by the shimmering corona -- a faint glow that surrounds the Sun like gossamer flower petals. This outer layer of the...

Astronomers over the past decade have made remarkable progress in the study of extrasolar planets; over 500 distant worlds are now confirmed. Meanwhile, as this active research community ...

Radio galaxies beam as much as one trillion solar-luminosities of radiation into space at radio wavelengths. They are therefore cosmic beacons, and the light from the most distant ones k...

Asteroids (or comets) whose orbits bring them close to the earth's orbit are called Near Earth Objects (NEOs). Some asteroids are old, dating from the origins of the solar system about f...

Just like a weather map for a local forecast on Earth, the colored circle depicts variations in temperature across a region. This particular map presents the range of temperature in a reg...

Cambridge, MA In an exciting example of international collaboration, a Qatar astronomer teamed with scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and other institut...

Stars form from giant clouds of gas and dust in space, as the matter in these clouds comestogether under the influence of gravity. A long-standing goal of astronomy has been to determine ...