Studying Planetary Nurseries Stars and planets are born in dense, cold interstellar clouds of gas and dust. These regions of space are opaque to visible light, but infrared light reveals...

Looking for Exoplanets From Your Home When a planet passes in front of its host star, it blocks a small amount of the star’s light. Detecting these so-called transits is largely a matter...

With techniques developed in quantum mechanics, molecular spectra can be modeled by a set of discrete fundamental parameters. The knowledge of these reference molecular spectroscopic para...

Jewels of the Night Sky American astronomer Benjamin Gould identified the belt of bright stars and nebulas that bears his name  in 1879, while he was assisting the Argentinian gover...

Exoplanets in the High School Classroom Most high schools don’t own telescopes capable of studying exoplanets. However, the telescopes used by modern astronomers are controlled by comput...

Infant Stars in a Stellar Nursery Cygnus-X was first identified as a bright source of radio emissions in the 1950s, when radio astronomy was still in its infancy. Located near the center...

Stars are hot and bright, but they are born from cold, dense, opaque nebulas known as molecular clouds. If something disturbs these clouds, they collapse and heat under the force of gravi...

A Gravitational Catalog As predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, massive bodies change the geometry of spacetime, which affects the paths of passing objects — including l...

Cambridge, MA - The first image of a black hole ever taken is being released today. This monumental achievement was made possible, in part, by key leadership and funding from the Center f...

When the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies accrete material, they can eject powerful jets of charged particles at speeds approaching that of light. These particles in tu...