Astronomers using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory have produced a spectacular image revealing new details of violent collisions involving at le...

Cambridge, MA - Life in the universe might be even rarer than we thought. Recently, astronomers looking for potentially habitable worlds have targeted red dwarf stars because they are ...

Cambridge, MA - The planets of our solar system come in two basic flavors, like vanilla and chocolate ice cream. We have small, rocky terrestrials like Earth and Mars, and large gas gi...

Cambridge, MA - Two worlds orbiting a distant star are about to become a snack of cosmic proportions. Astronomers announced today that the planets Kepler-56b and Kepler-56c will be swa...

Cambridge, MA - Astronomers announced today that they have discovered a new type of planet - a rocky world weighing 17 times as much as Earth. Theorists believed such a world couldn't ...

The region between the Sun's surface and its hot, million-degree corona is a complex interface zone. Only a few thousand kilometers deep, within it the density of the gas drops by a fact...

The vast majority of matter is the universe, about eighty-five percent of it, is so-called "dark matter." It consists not of ordinary atoms, but of some still unknown kind of particle. U...

Near the middle of the Milky Way, there lives a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* (Sgr A) that any day now might eat a gas cloud (called G2) that’s floating towards it at 5 mi...

Warm water vapor in the interstellar medium (about at room temperature) behaves roughly as expected from chemical models. This was the conclusion reached from observations by the Infrare...

Over ninety percent of the stars in our galaxy were born in stellar nurseries, clusters of stars nestled deep within clouds of dust and molecular gas. These young natal environments are k...