The universe immediately following the big bang contained mostly hydrogen and some helium. All the other elements needed to make galaxies, planets, and life were formed in stellar interi...

Eight hundred and eighty nine exoplanets (planets around stars other than our Sun) have been discovered to date. Most of them were found using the Kepler satellite, which spots small dip...

The Kepler mission has revolutionized the study of exoplanet statistics by increasing the number of known extrasolar planets and planet candidates by a factor of five, and by discovering ...

The Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard (DASCH) project has made the first of 12 planned data releases. DASCH is digitally scanning the ~500,000 glass plate images covering the full...

Cambridge, MA Detecting alien worlds presents a significant challenge since they are small, faint, and close to their stars. The two most prolific techniques for finding exoplanets are r...

Ramesh Narayan has been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - a private, non-profit society of distinguished scholars. The NAS was established by an Act of Congress...

Astronomers think that many galaxies, including our own Milky Way, have undergone similar collisions during their lifetimes. Although galaxy collisions are important and common, what h...

David Latham has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The Academy is one of the nation's most prestigious honorary societies and a leading center for inde...

Everybody wants teachers to be knowledgeable, but there is little

Scientists have used Chandra to make a detailed study of an enormous cloud of hot gas enveloping two large, colliding galaxies. This unusually large reservoir of gas contains as much mass...