Cambridge, MA New evidence from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory challenges prevailing ideas about how supermassive black holes grow in the centers of galaxies. Astronomers long have tho...

Seyfert galaxies are like normal galaxies, our own Milky Way included, except in one critical respect: their nuclei are fantastically bright. In some instances they are as luminous as 10...

On June 5, 2012, a rare event occurred - the planet Venus traversed the disk of the Sun, an event called a Venus transit. Because of the geometry of the orbits of Venus and the Earth, Ve...

Cambridge, MA Astronomers have found strong evidence that a massive black hole is being ejected from its host galaxy at a speed of several million miles per hour. New observations from N...

Supermassive black holes, some as massive as ten billion solar masses, are believed to lie at the nuclei of mostgalaxies. Radio observations have found jets of fast-moving charged particl...

Cambridge, MA As galaxies go, our Milky Way is pretty quiet. Active galaxies have cores that glow brightly, powered by supermassive black holes swallowing material, and often spit twin j...

Astronomers used to think that star formation simply involved the gradual coalescence of material under the influence of gravity. No longer. Making a new star is a complex process, amon...

Cambridge, MA The universe is a marvelously complex place, filled with galaxies and larger-scale structures that have evolved over its 13.7-billion-year history. Those began as small per...

On Tuesday, June 5th, the planet Venus will cross the face of the Sun for the last time until 2117. Since the Cambridge forecast is for cloudy weather, we will show this event via webcast...

The universe was born about 13.7 billion years ago in the big bang. The Sun and its system of planets formed about five billion years ago. What happened, then, during that long, interveni...