The Sun rotates slowly, about once every 24 days at its equator although the hot gas at every latitude rotates at a slightly different rate. Rotation helps to drive the mechanisms that p...

On Friday, Dec. 12, 1902, Andrew Carnegie moved into his just-finished home at 91st Street and Fifth Avenue, with his wife, Louise, and his 5-year-old daughter, Margaret, to whom he hande...

Cambridge, MA - Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) may have detected the dusty hallmarks of an entire family of Pluto-size objects swarming aroun...

On Friday, NASA successfully launched its next-generation spaceship farther than any astronaut has flown since the Apollo program of the 1960s. Though the Orion was unmanned during the te...

Stars are born in dense, cool clouds of molecular gas and dust. When the local density is high enough, the matter can gravitationally collapse to form a new star, a so-called young stella...

Cambridge, MA - Astronomers have measured the passing of a super-Earth in front of a bright, nearby Sun-like star using a ground-based telescope for the first time. The transit of the ...

Most galaxies lie in clusters, groupings of a few to many thousands of galaxies. Our Milky Way galaxy itself is a member of the "Local Group," a band of about fifty galaxies whose other ...

Astronomical observations of young protostars indicate that early planetary systems evolved from the dust in a protoplanetary disk very quickly - in under five million years. Such short ...

Cambridge, MA - Harvard researchers Robert Kirshner, Christopher Stubbs, and Peter Challis have been named co-recipients of the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for...

One of the most remarkable aspects of modern cosmology is that the properties of the largest physical structures in the universe reveal the properties of the smallest. The largest struct...