Cambridge, MA - Our solar system seems like a neat and orderly place, with small, rocky worlds near the Sun and big, gaseous worlds farther out, all eight planets following orbital pat...

SAO astrophysicist and senior scientist Scott Kenyon has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). To be elected a Fellow of the APS, a member must have made "exceptio...

Luminous infrared galaxies shine with the radiative output of tens of Milky Way galaxies, or even more. Their most striking feature, however, is not their tremendous energy output but the...

In 1978, the dwarf planet Pluto was discovered to have a companion, called Charon. With a mass about 12% Pluto’s mass, Charon orbits its partner about seventeen Pluto-radii away (for com...

Dr. Robert Kirshner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has received the James Craig Watson Medal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for his lifetime scientific achi...

George B. Field will receive the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship for 2014 from the American Astronomical Society. He is being recognized "for a lifetime of contributions to our basic und...

As of the start of the new year, 2014, there were about 1056 confirmed planets around stars other than our Sun ("exoplanets"), including 175 multiple planet systems. Surveys have found t...

Cambridge, MA - Researchers from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) today announced that they have measured the distance to galaxies more than six billion light years a...

The 2014 Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society has been awarded to Douglas (Doug) Finkbeiner, Harvard professor of astronomy and of physics, for the "discovery, in gamma rays, ...

Cambridge, MA - An international team of astronomers has discovered the first Earth-mass planet that transits, or crosses in front of, its host star. KOI-314c is the lightest planet to...