Many of our most profound mysteries -- for example, the nature of black holes, the birth of planets, and even the origin of life -- have stories that are intricately interwoven with the s...

There are currently 228 known planets around stars other than our sun, and all of them were discovered in one of only three kinds of observations: the periodic wobble of the "color" of th...

Cambridge, MA The leading method of finding planets orbiting distant stars spots mostly Jupiter-sized worlds. Technology limitations make it difficult to detect smaller planets. But that...

Ten billion years ago or so, at least according to the current picture, the youthful universe began to produce an abundance of new stars. The very first stars appeared in the young cosmo...

Black holes are often the sources of powerful emission despite their reputation for being implacable sinks for matter and energy. A black hole can be ringed by a disk of matter, and when...

Seyfert galaxies are quite similar to normal galaxies like our own Milky Way except in one critical respect: their nuclei are fantastically bright -- in some instances as luminous as 100...

The corona of a star is the hot, gaseous outer region of its atmosphere. The sun's corona is over a million kelvin, and in some stars can be even ten times hotter. In sun-like stars the c...

Cambridge, MA A team of scientists and engineers has been selected by NASA to study design concepts for a radio telescope destined for the far side of the Moon. The telescope, at present...

Cambridge, MA Four proposals for next-generation astronomy missions, which were developed by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), have received NASA fund...

In its infancy, before its planets formed, our sun was ringed by a disk of gas and dust. Astronomers estimate that the dust in this preplanetary disk coagulated and began forming structu...