Stars form as gravity contracts the gas and dust in an interstellar cloud until cores develop that become dense enough to coalesce into stars. The simple-sounding process is made much mo...

Cambridge, MA - Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have detected the faint molecular fingerprint of methyl chloride – a chemical commonly produce...

The universe is not only expanding - it is accelerating outward, driven by what is commonly referred to as "dark energy." The term is a poetic analogy to label for dark matter, the myste...

A mini-halo is a faint, diffuse region of radio emission that surrounds a cluster of galaxies. So far about thirty of these cluster mini-halos have been detected via their X-ray and radio...

Cambridge, MA - When fast radio bursts, or FRBs, were first detected in 2001, astronomers had never seen anything like them before. Since then, astronomers have found a couple of dozen...

The stratosphere of a planetary atmosphere is the layer in which the temperatures rise with altitude, in contrast to the tropospheric layer (near the ground) in which the temperature fall...

On August 9, NASA announced that SPHEREx is among three Medium-Class Explorer (MIDEX) missions selected for a "Phase A" study. The SPHEREx team, along with the two other chosen MIDEX mis...

A black hole X-ray binary (BHXB) is a black hole orbiting a normal star. When matter from the normal star accretes onto the black hole, a jet of charged particles is ejected at relativis...

The physical properties of the Milky Way, our home galaxy, and its evolutionary history are keys to understanding the history of galaxy formation across the cosmos, and details like the e...

Cambridge, MA - In everyday life, ultraviolet, or UV, light earns a bad reputation for being responsible for sunburns and other harmful effects on humans. However, research suggests th...