Cambridge, MA - Sparked by an image uploaded to Twitter, new research indicates that the light produced by black hole accretion may be bright enough to reflect off of dust, illuminating ...

Mergers of galaxy clusters are the most extreme events knwon in the universe, releasing the energy equivalent of up to a million galaxies shining for a million years. The shocks and turbu...

Cambridge, MA - Scientists today announced that they have observed the most luminous kilonova candidate on record, a find which challenges conventional theories of what happens in the aft...

A galactic bar is the approximately linear structure of stars and gas that stretches across the inner regions of some galaxies. The bar stretches from one inner spiral arm, across the nuc...

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 ...

Summary text

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 ...