Cambridge, MA - Our Sun is a relatively quiet star that only occasionally releases solar flares or blasts of energetic particles that threaten satellites and power grids. You might thi...

One well-trusted method of finding an exoplanet is to see how much wobble it induces in its parent star. Right now, the state of the art precision for detecting planets a few dozen light-...

Cambridge, MA - In many ways stars are like living beings. They're born; they live; they die. And they even have a heartbeat. Using a novel technique, astronomers have detected thousan...

3C 273 is the nearest high-luminosity quasar to Earth, about two billion light-years away, and shining with the power of more than about three thousand Milky Way galaxies. Since its disc...

Cambridge, MA -

Cambridge, MA - The collection of rocky planets orbiting distant stars has just grown by one, and the latest discovery is the most intriguing one to date. The newfound world, although ...

There are almost 1800 confirmed exoplanets known today, and over 4000 exoplanet candidates. Astronomers have obtained estimates for the masses and radii (and hence the average densities) ...

Cambridge, MA - When astronomers study protoplanetary disks of gas and dust that surround young stars, they sometimes spot a dark gap like the Cassini division in Saturn's rings. It ha...

A black hole is so simple (at least in traditional theories) that it can be completely described by just three parameters: its mass, its spin, and its electric charge. Even though it may...

Massive young stars are known to emit strong X-rays. Unlike the X-ray emission from lower mass stars, however, which arises in stellar photospheres, the X-rays from massive stars are thou...