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...

There are 1822 confirmed exoplanets reported so far, and NASA's Kepler satellite has found evidence for more than two thousand others. Many exoplanets are expected to be in systems with ...

Cambridge, MA - What is a planet? For generations of kids the answer was easy. A big ball of rock or gas that orbited our Sun, and there were nine of them in our solar system. But then...

The Pleiades star cluster, a brilliant collection of several hundred stars visible in the winter sky near the constellation of Orion, has been admired by people for thousands of years; it...

A planet may be causing the star it orbits to act much older than it actually is, according to new data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. This discovery shows how a massive planet ca...