Supernovae are the explosive deaths of massive stars. Among the most momentous events in the cosmos, they disburse into space all of the chemical elements that were produced inside their...

Physicist Trevor Weekes chose a specialty that fit his personality.He wasn't fond of working with large groups of scientists, so he steered away from a big particle-accelerator project a...

Our Milky Way, like other galaxies, assembled over cosmic time from rarefied, gaseous material into immense, regular systems of hydrogen-burning stars. The processes responsible for this ...

Asteroids (or comets) whose orbits bring them close to the earth's orbit are called near Earth objects. Some of them are old, dating from the origins of the solar system about four and o...

Cambridge, MA - W49A might be one of the best-kept secrets in our galaxy. This star-forming region shines 100 times brighter than the Orion nebula, but is so obscured by dust that very...

The element phosphorus is an indispensable ingredient for life along with carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and sulfur. But phosphorus is much less abundant in the universe than these ...

Cambridge, MA - First discovered in 2007, "fast radio bursts" continue to defy explanation. These cosmic chirps last for only a thousandth of a second. The characteristics of the radio...

Although many of the details about star formation are vigorously debated, the general principles are reasonably well understood. Stars form as the gas and dust in a molecular cloud coale...

Cambridge, MA - The scale of the universe can be difficult to comprehend. Pretend you are going to make a scale model with a basketball representing the Earth and a tennis ball as the ...

Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are the brightest events in the known universe. These flashes of high-energy light occur about once a day, randomly, from around the sky. While a burst is underwa...