"We don't send anyone through here without a personal guide," joked Matt Holman as he led a visitor through a maze of corridors and crossways at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astroph...

Cambridge, MA Astronomers are constantly on the hunt for ever-colder star-like bodies, and two years ago a new class of objects was discovered by researchers using NASA's WISE space tele...

In our solar system, dust particles are abundant, created by asteroid collisions andby the evaporation of comets. These particles are the source of the zodiacal light, a diffuse glow in t...

Astronomers trying to understand how the Sun and Earth formed, and why they have their characteristic properties, have made progress on a closely related problem: the nature of the lowest...

About 940 confirmed exoplanets (planets around stars other than our Sun)have been discovered since the first one was detected over ten years ago. Researchers have been working steadily ev...

Supermassive black holes (those with millions to billions of solar-masses) are thought to reside at the centers of most galaxies. These black holes must have undergone periods of intense ...

Astronomers are steadily zeroing in on Earth-like exoplanets: those transiting terrestrial-sized exoplanets located in their stellar habitable zones (the region where temperatures allow w...

Cambridge, MA More than 12 billion years ago a star exploded, ripping itself apart and blasting its remains outward in twin jets at nearly the speed of light. At its death it glowed so b...

The cosmic X-ray background (CXB) was first discovered in the early 1960s, several years before the detection of the more famous cosmic microwave background (the remnant radiation dating ...

For the first time since exoplanets, or planets around stars other than the sun, were discovered almost 20 years ago, X-ray observations have detected an exoplanet passing in front of its...