Cosmic rays are very rapidly moving nuclear particles that impact the earth from space, and generally originate from well beyond the solar system. The energies of these particles can be m...

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Cambridge, MA On April 9, the Sun erupted and blasted a bubble of hot, ionized gas into the solar system. The eruption was observed in unprecedented detail by a fleet of spacecraft, reve...

Galaxies frequently collide with one another, leaving evidence for their stupendous interactions nearly everywhere in the sky. Our own Milky Way galaxy, for example, is heading towards it...

The complex sequence of events that lead to star formation, processes once thought to involve just the simple coalescence of material under the influence of gravity, continues to amaze an...

Cambridge, MA What do military detections of jet aircraft, space-based Earth observations, and studies of distant, extrasolar planets have in common? All make use of HITRAN, which stands...

The Earth is not the only planet whose atmosphere experiences seasonal weather changes. Optical observations of planets in our outer solar solar system, (Jupiter and Saturn, for example) ...

Most stars form in clusters, sometimes with ten thousand or more stars packed into a volume smaller than a few light-years in radius. (By way of comparison, the nearest star to the sun is...

Over the past two decades astronomers have come to realize that many galaxies are fabulously luminous -- some are more than a thousand times brighter than our Milky Way. Yet the most powe...

Here on earth we are aware of ultraviolet (UV) radiation in space because of the dangers it poses to our health; the atmosphere is our shield against its damaging effects. Most astronomi...