Luke Skywalker's home in "Star Wars" is the desert planet Tatooine, with twin sunsets because it orbits two stars. So far, only uninhabitable gas-giant planets have been identified circli...

The universe was created 13.7 billion years ago in a blaze of light: the big bang. Roughly 380,000 years later, after matter (mostly hydrogen) had cooled enough for neutral atoms to for...

Cambridge, MA - NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has teamed up with a telescope on the ground to find a remote gas planet about 13,000 light-years away, making it one of the most distant...

Become an astronomer for a day! Enjoy telescope tours, interactive multimedia exhibits, hands-on activities, live demonstrations, prizes, and our ever-popular Scientist Cafe, where visito...

Astronomers have known for decades that the merger of two normal stars is a frequent and astronomically important phenomenon. In globular clusters, for example, with as many as several m...

Cambridge, MA - For the first time, astronomers have detected the presence of complex organic molecules, the building blocks of life, in a protoplanetary disk surrounding a young star,...

The distance to celestial objects is key to calculating their intrinsic properties like mass and luminosity. Distance, unfortunately, is also one of the most difficult parameters to meas...

Cambridge, MA - Stars form when gravity pulls together material within giant clouds of gas and dust. But gravity isn't the only force at work. Both turbulence and magnetic fields battl...

New stars regularly appear in the night sky as the gas and dust in giant interstellar clouds gradually coalesce under the influence of gravity. The process of making stars, however, is i...

A software application based on an algorithm created by a NASA challenge has the potential to increase the number of new asteroid discoveries by amateur astronomers.Analysis of images tak...