The optical spectra of nearby star-forming galaxies provide astronomers with a comprehensive view of the ionized gas in their interstellar medium (ISM). Atoms in the gas, excited to vary...

TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, was launched in 2018 with the goal of discovering small planets around the Sun's nearest neighbors, stars bright enough to allow for follo...

Cambridge, MA - The monstrous black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy—now of Nobel Prize fame—is proving yet again to be stranger than fiction. New research from scientists at th...

As the slightly spinning material in a pre-stellar condensation collapses to form a star, angular momentum conservation shapes it into a circumstellar disk. Planets form from the gas and ...

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Once a black hole forms, its intense gravitational field produces a surface beyond which even light cannot escape, and it appears black to outsiders.  All the details of the complex ...

Cambridge, MA - An international team of scientists has discovered planet formation in a star system younger than 500,000 years old. The find, published today in Nature, is a marked depar...

Dust is found scattered throughout space.  It is composed of fine particles made of silicates, like sand on Earth, or of carbon, and these are often blended with other elements. &nbs...

The solar corona, the hot outer layer of the Sun, has a temperature of over a million degrees Kelvin and powers a wind of charged particles, some of which bombard the Earth producing auro...

Cambridge, MA - Analysis of previously unpublished data from observations of M87* between 2009 and 2013 by scientists at the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has revealed that the crescent s...