A new program called "Finding Life in Outer Space" debuted on the Smithsonian Channel on March 25. The scientific lead for this program is Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Jeremy ...

Measuring the mass of a celestial body is one of the most challenging tasks in observational astronomy. The most successful method uses binary systems because the orbital parameters of t...

A merger between galaxies can trigger can intense radiation from bursts star formation and from the accretion of gas onto the two supermassive black holes at their centers. Astronomers h...

On February 12, 2018, the pioneering geologist Ursula Marvin passed away. Ursula was born and raised in Vermont, and went to college at Tufts, graduating in 1943. She developed at Tufts a...

Over 3500 extra-solar planets have been confirmed to date. Most of them were discovered using the transit method, and astronomers can combine the transit light curves with velocity wobbl...

Cambridge, MA - Scientists have observed a new class of quantum matter at the very smallest scales in one of the coldest environments ever made. This discovery could pave the way for n...

Cambridge, MA - A team of astrophysicists and planetary scientists has predicted that Neptune-like planets located near the center of the Milky Way galaxy have been transformed into ro...

Some galaxies in the universe are as much as a thousand times more luminous than our Milky Way galaxy, with most of their light being emitted in the infrared. Astronomers attribute that ...

The Sun glows with a surface temperature of about 5500 degrees Celsius. On the other hand its hot outer layer, the corona, has a temperature of over a million degrees and ejects a wind o...

The galaxy Arp 220 is ultraluminous (defined as having more than about 300 times the luminosity of our own galaxy) and, at a distance of only about 260 million light-years, is the closest...