IC348 is a glowing nebula of young stars, hot gas, and cold dust seen in the direction of the constellation of Perseus. It is the nearest rich cluster of young stars to earth, being only...

The existence of black holes is one of the most amazing and bizarre predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity. Despite his originalmisgivings about their reality, massive black hole ho...

In southeastern Greenland, two rivers of ice named Helheim and Kangerdlugssuaq flow in spurts and starts toward the coast. They are much like any other glacier, except each carries a netw...

A brown dwarf, a star whose mass is less than about 8% of the sun's, lacks sufficient gravitational contraction to heat up its interior to the roughly ten million kelvin temperatures need...

Cambridge, MA NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has taken its first shots of the cosmos since warming up and starting its second career. The infrared telescope ran out of coolant on May 15,...

Dr. Giovanni G. Fazio, Senior Physicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, has been selected to receive the 2009 Secretary’s Distinguished Research Lecture Award of the Smithso...

One of the brightest stars in our galaxy is the aging, cool giant star NML Cygnus. It has a relatively enormous mass -- about forty times that of the sun -- and a luminosity nearly a mi...

Cambridge, MA A study published this week in the journal Nature offers an explanation for the origin of dwarf spheroidal galaxies. The research may settle an outstanding puzzle in unders...

Stars spin. The sun, for example, takes about twenty-five days to rotate, as can be seen by watching its dark sunspots move across the disk. Winds from stars, the sun included, play a r...

Washington, DC Ten years ago, on July 23, 1999, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory was launched aboard the space shuttle Columbia and deployed into orbit. Chandra has doubled its original ...