Astronomy's dramatic program to find planets around other stars now reports 859 confirmed exoplanets. One hundred twenty-eight of them are located in systems where multiple objects orbit...

Observatory Night lectures will take place on the third Thursday of the month from January through May. Topics will range from exploding stars and monster black holes to marauding dark cl...

"Submillimeter galaxies" (SMGs) are among the most luminous, rapidly star-forming galaxies known. Located so far away that their light has typically been traveling for over ten billion ...

Long Beach, CA Our Milky Way is a spiral galaxy - a pinwheel-shaped collection of stars, gas and dust. It has a central bar and two major spiral arms that wrap around its disk. Since we ...

Long Beach, CA The quest for a twin Earth is heating up. Using NASA's Kepler spacecraft, astronomers are beginning to find Earth-sized planets orbiting distant stars. A new analysis of K...

The ubiquitous clouds of gas and dust found between stars provide the natal material for new stars and planets. These clouds are also dynamic factories that produce many complex molecules...

Galaxies are often found in groups or clusters. The Milky Way, for example, is a member of the "Local Group" of about three dozen galaxies, which includes the Andromeda Galaxy located abo...

Astronomers have come to realize that the process of star formation, once thought to consist essentially of just the simple coalescence of material by gravity, occurs in a complex series ...

The Sun is located about 25,000 light-years from the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Like other spiral galaxies, the Milky Way has a disk with sweeping bands of stars, gas, and dust ...

Astronomers estimate that once the Sun began to shine it took the Earth another 50-100 million years to grow to its present size, as the solar system evolved. But how did the Earth get st...