Cambridge, MA For the first time, astronomers have found a supernova explosion with properties similar to a gamma-ray burst, but without seeing any gamma rays from it. The discovery, usi...

Dr. Margaret Geller of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has received the James Craig Watson Medal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for her extraordinary lifetime s...

Of the roughly 420 extra-solar planets now known, about a dozen are in the newly named category of "super-earths," planets whose masses are in between of two and about fifteen earth-mass...

Ultraluminous infrared galaxies have luminosities that exceed a trillion suns. (For comparison, the Milky Way's luminosity is only that of about ten billion suns.) Extreme infrared activ...

Dr. Margaret Geller of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has received the 2010 Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the American Astronomical Society for her lifetime of work...

Astronomers have only modest laboratories to probe the mysteries of the cosmos. Mostly they have to rely on meticulous and clever observations of remote phenomena. Identifying the most in...

Washington, DC Most searches for planets around other stars, also known as exoplanets, focus on Sun-like stars. Those searches have proven successful, turning up more than 400 alien worl...

NASA has extended a contract with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., to provide science and operational support for the Chandra X-ray Observatory, a powerful t...

The constellation of Vela (visible only from the southern hemisphere) contains a set of giant clouds of gas and dust known collectively as the Vela Molecular complex. The Vela clouds con...

Although over 400 extra-solar planets are now known orbiting stars other than our sun, nearly all of these planets are bigger than the Earth in both mass and size. In fact, most of them a...