Cambridge, MA - The distant planet GJ 1132b intrigued astronomers when it was discovered last year. Located just 39 light-years from Earth, it might have an atmosphere despite being ba...

Planets develop from the dusty placental disk of material that surrounds a star after it begins to shine. The dust in that disk, according to most models, starts to stick to itself until ...

Chiral molecules are those that have a "handedness," that is, they take one of two forms, identical in chemical composition but with mirror image shapes - like our right and left hands: ...

Cambridge, MA - The universe is 13.8 billion years old, while our planet formed just 4.5 billion years ago. Some scientists think this time gap means that life on other planets could b...

Dr. Igor Pikovski has been selected as one of nine recipients of a 2016 Branco Weiss Fellowship, a fellowship for outstanding postdoctoral researchers awarded by the ETH Zurich (Swiss Fed...

A black hole in traditional theory is characterized by having "no hair," that is, it is so simple that it can be completely described by just three parameters, its mass, its spin, and its...

Cambridge, MA - Astronomers have used data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to make a discovery that may have profound implications for understanding how the magnetic field in the...

Stars form as gravity contracts the gas and dust in an interstellar cloud until clumps develop that are dense enough to coalesce into stars. Precisely how this happens, however, is very u...

The Outer Space Treaty bars any nation — and by extension, corporation — from owning property on a celestial body, but a loophole in the pact may amount to the same thing, warns a Harvard...

NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will launch September 2016 and travel to the near-Earth asteroid Bennu to harvest a sample of surface material and return it to Earth for study. But before th...