Heterocyclic molecules are those containing atoms of at least two different elements (plus hydrogen) arranged in a ring structure. Nitrogen heterocycles are key components in biological n...

Cambridge, MA - An international team of astronomers, led by University of Hawai'i graduate student Ashley Chontos, announced the confirmation of the first exoplanet candidate identifi...

Brown dwarfs are stars less massive than the sun and unable to burn hydrogen. They comprise (at least in mass) a bridge between planets and stars, and astronomers think that they form and...

The supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, Sagittarius A*, is by far the closest such object to us, only about 25 thousand light-years away. Although not ne...

TRAPPIST-1 is a system of seven Earth-sized worlds orbiting an ultra-cool dwarf star about 120 light-years away. The star, and hence its system of planets, is thought to be between five-...

Cambridge, MA - NASA has selected a new space mission that will help astronomers understand both how our universe evolved and how common are the ingredients for life in our galaxy's plan...

Cambridge, MA - Astronomers have spent decades looking for something that sounds like it would be hard to miss: about a third of the "normal" matter in the Universe. New results from N...

Most stars form in clusters of hundreds of stars. In contrast to isolated stars, whose formation is increasingly well understood by astronomers, the hows and whys of cluster formation are...

Cambridge, MA -

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was launched on April 18 of last year with the primary objective of discovering transiting planets smaller than Neptune around stars brigh...