Of the 300 or so extra-solar planets known, twenty-eight have been found because they transit their star (that is, their orbits take them in front of their star as seen from earth). An ex...

Cambridge, MA Astronomers have uncovered strong evidence that brown dwarfs form like stars. Using the Smithsonian's Submillimeter Array (SMA), they detected molecules of carbon monoxide ...

Ultraluminous infrared galaxies ("ULIRGs") shine with the luminosity of one hundred or more Milky Way galaxies. Their most striking feature, however, is not their tremendous energy outpu...

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The universe contains many fabulously luminous galaxies, some of them more than a thousand times brighter than our own Milky Way. Most of them are practically invisible at optical wavele...

New stars tend to form with disks of gas and dust around them. After a few hundred thousand years or so, the intense ultraviolet radiation from the most massive of these stars has expell...

When the first infrared cosmic survey satellite, IRAS, looked at the nearby star Epsilon Eridani in 1984, it found that the star emitted a large excess of cool infrared radiation. This st...

In 1998, a NASA team led by SAO astronomers launched a space mission to study water in space (and some other key molecules and atoms as well). The satellite, the Submillimeter Wave Astron...

Cambridge, MA Astronomers have discovered that the nearby star Epsilon Eridani has two rocky asteroid belts and an outer icy ring, making it a triple-ring system. The inner asteroid belt...

The longest known collimated structures in the universe are the narrow jets that emanate from vicinity of powerful black holes in certain types of galactic nuclei. These narrow beams ca...