Planets form from the gas and dust in disks that surround young stars. Chemicals in the disk that evaporate easily, called volatiles, include important molecules like water, carbon monoxi...

Star formation in molecular clouds usually occurs in a two-step process.  Supersonic flows first compress the clouds into dense filaments light-years long, after which gravity collap...

Cambridge, MA - Using the power of supercomputers, an international team of researchers has zoomed in on the smallest clumps of dark matter in a virtual universe. Published today in Natur...

Cambridge, MA - Dr. Patrick (Pat) Slane of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) has been named the next Director of the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC), which controls...

An active galactic nucleus (AGN) is a supermassive black hole residing at the core of a galaxy that is accreting material. The accretion occurs in the vicinity of the hot torus around the...

Giant elliptical galaxies, the oldest known large galactic structures in the universe, have no spiral arms and little or no current star formation activity, but their central supermassive...

A new theory published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by scientists from Harvard University suggests that the Sun may once have had a binary companion of similar mass. If con...

The debate over the origins and molecular structure of 'Oumuamua continued today with an announcement in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that despite earlier promising claims, the inter...

A hot Jupiter is a gas giant exoplanet roughly similar to Jupiter in our solar system but orbiting so close to its host star (with a period less than about ten days) that its atmosphere i...

Recent observations of Betelgeuse have revealed that the star's unexpected and significant dimming periods in late 2019 and early 2020 were most likely caused by the ejection and cooling ...