The orbits of the planets in our solar system are almost circular (Kepler made the case for their actually being ellipses). This nearly circular, concentric property helps keep the sola...

Brian Greene writes: "Some 14 billion years ago, a violent burst of antigravity drove space to expand at a blistering rate that momentarily exceeded the speed of light. Or at least that’s...

If you're an x-ray mirror, then being thin can help you see better...in space! The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory is developing a thinner mirror for a future x-ray telescope called...

Atomic hydrogen is the lightest and by far most abundant element in the universe. When it is exposed to ultraviolet light, its single electron can be stripped from the atom, a situation t...

Cambridge, MA - The Minor Planet Center, located at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) in Cambridge, Mass., has announced the recipients of the 2013 Edgar Wilson Award for...

Galaxy clusters are groupings of several to thousands of galaxies. Most galaxies are members of a cluster. In our own case, the Milky Way is a member of the "Local Group," a band of about...

Perhaps the most astonishing and revolutionary discovery in cosmology was that galaxies are moving away from us. Hubble's 1929 paper provides the underpinning of the big bang picture of c...

Cambridge, MA -

About fifteen years ago astronomers, using improved submillimeter wavelength telescopes, discovered a new class of very distant galaxies: submillimeter galaxies (SMGs). These objects are...

A star is typically born with a disk of gas and dust encircling it, the spinning remnant of the much larger cloud of natal material. As the star begins to shine, planets develop from the...