Cambridge, MA - A massive protostar, still cradled within its tightly packed star-forming cloud, recently roared to life, shining 70 times brighter than before and warming the surround...

Supernovae, the explosive deaths of massive stars, are among the most momentous events in the cosmos because they disburse into space all of the chemical elements that were produced insid...

Cambridge, MA - The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has looked for many different signs of alien life, from radio broadcasts to laser flashes, without success. However, newly ...

The recent detection of gravitation waves (GW) from the merger of two black holes of about thirty solar-masses each with the ground-based LIGO facility has generated renewed enthusiasm fo...

Cambridge, MA - Three decades ago, astronomers spotted one of the brightest exploding stars in more than 400 years. The titanic supernova, called Supernova 1987A (SN 1987A), blazed wit...

The interstellar medium of the Milky Way contains 5-10% of the total mass of the galaxy (excluding its dark matter) and consists primarily of hydrogen gas. There are small but important c...

When a star like our sun gets to be very old, after another seven billion years or so, it will no longer be able to sustain burning its nuclear fuel. With only about half of its mass rema...

Cambridge, MA - Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are brief spurts of radio emission, lasting just one-thousandth of a second, whose origins are mysterious. Fewer than two dozen have been ident...

Very young stars host gaseous nebulae and protoplanetary disks where planetary systems form. The lifetimes of these disks place important constraints on the timescale of the planet format...

Cambridge, MA - All known black holes fall into two categories: small, stellar-mass black holes weighing a few Suns, and supermassive black holes weighing millions or billions of Suns....