How Sweet It Is
Astronomers have detected about 180 molecules in interstellar space, from simple ones like carbon monoxide (one atom of carbon and one of oxygen) to complex species like buckminsterfuller...
Record-Breaking Stellar Explosion Helps Understand Far-Off Galaxy
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Cambridge, MA
Nature hath no fury like a dying star – and astronomers couldn’t be happier…
Space-Warping White Dwarfs Produce Gravitational Waves
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Cambridge, MA
Gravitational waves, much like the recently discovered Higgs boson, are notoriously difficult to observe. Scientists first detected these ripples in the fabric of space-tim...
A Super Cluster of Galaxies
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Most galaxies lie in clusters, groupings of several to many thousands of galaxies. Our Milky Way galaxy itself is a member of the "Local Group," a band of about fifty galaxies whose othe...
Animation: Dizzying Dance of the Kepler Candidates
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(Written by Christine Pulliam, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, for Smithsonian Science, a website featuring highlights of scientific research at the Smithsonian Institution.)
Have ...
Recreating a Slice of the Universe
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Cambridge, MA
Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and their colleagues at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) have invented a new comp...
Phoenix Cluster Sets Record Pace at Forming Stars
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Cambridge, MA
Astronomers have found an extraordinary galaxy cluster, one of the largest objects in the universe, that is breaking several important cosmic records. Observations of the P...
The Cosmic Infrared Background
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The cosmic infrared background is the collective infrared radiation emitted by cosmic sources throughout the history of the universe, including sources inaccessible to current telescopes....
Astronomers Release the Largest Ever Three-Dimensional Map of the Sky
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Cambridge, MA
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) has released the largest three-dimensional map of massive galaxies and distant black holes ever created. The new map pinpoints t...
The Spectral Energy Distribution of Protostars
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Stars form when gravitational forces coalesce the gas and dust in interstellar clouds until the material forms clumps dense enough to become stars. Precisely how this happens, however, is...