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...

Cambridge, MA - What: Press conference on first result from Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) projectWhen: Wednesday, April 10, 2019 - 9:00 am

Stars form from the gas and dust in molecular clouds via a series of complex processes that are currently only partly understood, and the evolution of these clouds drives the evolution of...

Cambridge, MA - A team of scientists has proposed a powerful new test for inflation, the theory that the universe dramatically expanded in size in a fleeting fraction of a second right a...

The sparsely distributed hot gas that exists in the space between galaxies, the intergalactic medium, is ionized. The question is, how? Astronomers know that once the early universe expa...

All massive galaxies are believed to host supermassive black holes (SMBH) at their centers that grow by accreting mass from their environment. The current picture also imagines that the b...

Minneapolis, MN & Amado, AZ - Muon Hunters 2: Return of the Ring, launches new Zooniverse citizen science project on March 14th, 2019.