A hallmark of great research and educational institutions is their drive for introspection and self-improvement. In keeping with this, the Smithsonian Institution recently began a five-ye...

Astronomical masers (the radio wavelength analogs of lasers) were first identified in space over fifty years ago and have since been seen in many locations; astronomical lasers have since...

Cambridge, MA - After a nearly twenty-year long game of cosmic hide-and-seek, astronomers using ESA's XMM-Newton space observatory have finally found evidence of hot, diffuse gas perme...

Near Earth Objects (NEOs) are small solar system bodies whose orbits sometimes bring them close to the Earth, potentially threatening a collision. NEOs are tracers of the composition, dy...

There are currently about fifty known exoplanets whose diameters range from Mars-sized to several times the Earth's and which also reside within their stars' habitable zone – the orbital ...

Cambridge, MA - NASA and its partners launched a rocket-borne camera to the edge of space at 2:54 p.m. EDT May 29, 2018, on its third flight to study the Sun. The clarity of images ret...

Supermassive black holes at the nuclei of most galaxies, including our Milky Way, develop gradually as material accretes onto the seed black hole. The physical processes that drive this g...

Cambridge, MA - To study the most extreme objects in the Universe, astronomers sometimes have to go to some extreme places themselves. Over the past several months, a team of scientist...

Cambridge, MA - Astronomers have proposed a new model for the invisible material that makes up most of the matter in the Universe. They have studied whether a fraction of dark matter p...