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...

Astronomers are celebrating the dedication of a new planet-hunting telescope known as Minerva. Installed at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Arizona, the Minerva project is an arr...

The longest known highly collimated structures in the universe are the narrow jets that emanate from the vicinity of powerful black holes in certain types of galactic nuclei. These narr...

The Giant Magellan Telescope Organization has announced today that its 11 international partners have committed more than US$500 million to begin construction of the first of a new genera...

The first stars and galaxies began forming a few hundred million years after the big bang, and after a billion years their physical processes dominated the evolution of cosmic structure. ...