Cambridge, MA - The center of the Milky Way galaxy is currently a quiet place where a supermassive black hole slumbers, only occasionally slurping small sips of hydrogen gas. But it wa...

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 - Astronomers studying distant galaxies powered by monster black holes have uncovered an unexpected link between two very different wavelengths of the light they emit, th...

Harvard graduate student and astrophysicist Anjali Tripathi has been named a White House Fellow for 2016-17. She is one of 16 Fellows selected from more than 1,000 applicants.

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...