Massive stars tend to form in clusters as the gas and dust in molecular clouds collapses and fragments under the influence of gravity. In the classic picture of star formation, gravity m...

Water, the key ingredient for life, is not only abundant on Earth, it is also ubiquitous across the solar system. Either as ice or sometimes as liquid, water has been spotted in comets, ...

Cambridge, MA - The moon passed between the Earth and the sun on Thursday, Oct. 23. While avid stargazers in North America looked up to watch the spectacle, the best vantage point was ...

Supermassive black holes containing millions or even billions of solar-masses of material are found at the nuclei of galaxies. Our Milky Way, for example, has a nucleus with a black hole ...

Astronomers Chih-Hao Li and David Phillips of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics want to rediscover Venus—that familiar, nearby planet stargazers can see with the naked eye m...

The solar chromosphere is the region between the Sun’s surface and its hot, million-degree corona. Within this complex interface zone, only a few thousand kilometers deep, the density of...

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Although thousands of exoplanets and hundreds of planetary systems (stars with multiple exoplanets) are now known, astronomers still don’t know whether our solar system is typical. The di...

In the last decade, the unprecedented sensitivity of astronomical observations has powered a revolution in our understanding of galaxies in the young universe. It is now possible to stud...

On top of a flattened mountain in Chile's Atacama Desert, one of the world's largest telescopes may help scientists answer the age-old question, "Is there life out there?" Currently under...