Cambridge, MA - Every school kid learns the basic structure of the Earth: a thin outer crust, a thick mantle, and a Mars-sized core. But is this structure universal? Will rocky exoplan...

Star formation environments can be roughly grouped into three types, categorized by the density of their gas (or more precisely, the projected "surface" density of the gas, which is easie...

The NCSU Libraries and NC State's College of Sciences present two events celebrating a large, HD video feed of near-real time solar activity.The NCSU Libraries and NC State College of Sci...

Massive quiescent galaxies have masses in stars of over one hundred billion Suns; our Milky Way by comparison has only about half that amount. In the local universe, the stars in these ga...

Cambridge, MA - How did the universe begin? And what came before the Big Bang? Cosmologists have asked these questions ever since discovering that our universe is expanding. The answer...

The search for exoplanets via the radial velocity technique has been underway for nearly 30 years. The method searches for wobbles in a star's motion caused by the presence of orbiting bo...

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) astronomy software has a new institutional home: the American Astronomical Society (AAS). This follows a vote by the Society's governing board at the 227th A...

Stars like the Sun begin their lives as cold, dense cores of dust and gas that collapse under the influence of gravity until nuclear fusion is ignited. These cores contain hundreds to th...

The space between stars is not empty, but contains an abundance of diffuse material, about 5-10% of the total mass of our galaxy (excluding dark matter). Most of the material is gas, pred...

Kissimmee, FL - Globular star clusters are extraordinary in almost every way. They're densely packed, holding a million stars in a ball only about 100 light-years across on average. Th...