A newborn star typically goes through four stages of adolescence. It begins life as a protostar still enshrouded in its natal molecular cloud, accreting new material and developing a prot...

Cambridge, MA - Our Earth consists of silicate rocks and an iron core with a thin veneer of water and life. But the first potentially habitable worlds to form might have been very diff...

Blazars are galaxies whose central, supermassive black holes are accreting material from surrounding regions. Although black hole accretion happens in many galaxies and situations, in the...

The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) is holding discussions with the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) on a new 6.5-meter optical/near-infrared telescope to be bui...

Prior to the Apollo missions to the Moon, scientists speculated that volatiles - including water - may have accumulated in permanently shaded regions at the poles. Then the Apollo era bro...

Though Harvard faculty members often garner accolades for their pioneering research, they are perhaps less often publically celebrated for their talents as teachers and mentors. In that s...

The Kepler satellite was designed to search for Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of stars by measuring dips in a star's brightness as orbiting planets move across the stellar di...

It was 16 degrees on a January night, the cold made worse by the fatigue of working so many hours. Box after box, heavy with glass, had to pass through the basement window, into the snow-...

The gas in galaxies is typically seen to be moving at very rapid, even supersonic velocities, providing clear evidence that the medium is highly turbulent. Looking more closely at gas clo...

Unfortunately for Moiya McTier, reality doesn't always imitate fiction. Sometimes in life — in McTier's life, anyway — the galaxy throws you a curve.In March, the Harvard senior was finis...