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...

Galaxies with extremely high rates of star formation (from hundreds to thousands of solar-masses worth of stars per year) are rare. Our Milky Way, for example, makes only about one star ...

Cambridge, MA - A black hole four million times as massive as our Sun lurks at the center of the Milky Way. This black hole, called Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), swallows nearby material th...

The universe is about 13.8 billion years old, and its stars are arguably its most momentous handiwork. Astronomers studying the intricacies of star formation across cosmic time are tryin...