December 25, 2007 Jets Are a Real Drag News Release Astronomers have found the best evidence yet of matter spiraling outward from a young, still-forming star in fountain-like jets. Due to the spiral motion, the jets help the star to grow by drawing angular momentum from the surrounding accretion disk.

December 17, 2007 New View of Distant Galaxy Reveals Furious Star Formation News Release A furious rate of star formation discovered in a distant galaxy shows that galaxies in the early universe developed either much faster or in a different way from what astronomers have thought.

December 11, 2007 Luminous and Lensed Science Update SAO astronomers Melanie Krips and David Wilner used the Submillimeter Array (SMA) to study APM08279+5255 with very fine spatial resolution. They report confirming clear evidence of two separate peaks. But their careful modeling of the millimeter images, accounting for Einstein's lensing effect, shows that the images are not distortions of the same bright nucleus, but rather a single image of a double source.

August 28, 2007 Bright Galaxies in the Early Universe Science Update A team of seven SAO astronomers led by graduate student Josh Younger, together with seventeen of their colleagues, has used the Submillimeter Array (SMA) in Hawaii to study seven ultraluminous galaxies so distant that their light was emitted only about three billion years after the big bang.

August 8, 2007 Astronomers Spot Brightest Galaxies in the Distant Universe News Release By combining the capabilities of several telescopes, astronomers have spotted extremely bright galaxies hiding in the distant, young universe. The newfound galaxies are intrinsically bright due to their large rate of star formation-1000 times greater than the Milky Way. However, much of that light is hidden by surrounding dust and gas, leaking out only in the infrared.

August 7, 2007 Two Telescopes Combine to Probe Young "Family" of Stars News Release A spectacular new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope uncovers a small group of young stellar "siblings" in the southern portion of the Serpens cloud - located approximately 848 light-years away from Earth. Scientists suspect that this discovery will lead them to more clues about how these cosmic families, which contain hundreds of gravitationally bound stars, form and interact.

June 05, 2007 The Weather on Venus Science Update Venus is so much like the Earth in its size and composition that it is sometimes called our sister planet, but it differs in at least one relatively dramatic way: it has very little water. Scientists suspect this lack of water might help to explain why Venus has such a dense cloud cover of carbon dioxide, and why its surface is so hot (about 750 degrees kelvin), among other things.

May 01, 2007 Astronomers Find Super-massive Planet News Release Today, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) announced that they have found the most massive known transiting extrasolar planet. The gas giant planet, called HAT-P-2b, contains more than eight times the mass of Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system. Its powerful gravity squashes it into a ball only slightly larger than Jupiter.

April 30, 2007 Spitzer Digs Up Hidden Stars News Release "BHR 71 has been a favorite object of mine for years," said Tyler Bourke of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "This spectacular new Spitzer image really shows off the changes in the jets, in ways impossible at other wavelengths."

February 06, 2007 The Birth of Twins Science Update More than about half of all stars roughly similar to the Sun or larger (in mass) are part of multiple systems -- binary stars, or even triplets, that orbit around one another. This tendency reflects the conditions that existed when stars like the Sun were born, since most probably such stars were born as multiplets and did not pair up later on in their lives. The local conditions in turn reveal the prevailing environment when planets (if any) form.

January 02, 2007 The Gestation of Massive Stars Science Update Two SAO astronomers, Luis Zapata and Paul Ho, together with a colleague, have used radio telescopes to follow up the SMA results. They report finding elongated disks around four of the embedded stars, and are able to estimate the disks' masses. What they find is a surprise: in the few previous cases where disks have been adequately studied around such stars, they are typically ten times smaller in mass than the star itself.