Scientists at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory near Tucson supplied data to help NASA's Kepler mission confirm an Earth-like planet in the "habitable zone" around a sun-like star 140...

Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the universe (after hydrogen and helium) and of course it is important: all known life forms require liquid water and its oxygen content. For...

The number 16 can be pretty special. For many people, their 16th birthday is cause for celebration: perhaps an opportunity to drive a car, a time to think about the next steps of educatio...

Stars do not stand still. They move through the heavens with motions determined by their encounters with other stars and stellar systems. Stellar velocities in the Milky Way are typically...

When I asked Scott Kenyon about his reaction to the news that New Horizons had actually flown by Pluto, his answer wasn't that different from those of the myriad of people I've chatted wi...

Astronomers generally accept the notion that black holes at the centers of galaxies co-evolve with their host galaxies, and that they have done did so during all cosmic epochs, from the e...

A star is typically born with a disk of gas and dust encircling it, from which planets develop as dust grains in the disk collide, stick together and grow. These disks, warmed by the sta...

The space between stars is not empty -- it contains a vast reservoir of diffuse material with about 5-10% of the total mass of our Milky Way galaxy. Most of the material is gas, but abou...

Most if not all galaxies are thought to host a supermassive black hole in their nuclei, a finding that is both one the most important and amazing in modern astronomy. A supermassive black...

Small, dense interstellar clouds of gas and dust, containing hundreds to thousands of solar-masses of material, are suspected of being the precursors to stars and stellar clusters. These...