Cambridge, MA - Earth's aurorae, or Northern and Southern Lights, provide a dazzling light show to people living in the polar regions. Shimmering curtains of green and red undulate acr...

The Kepler spacecraft, with its 1.4-meter diameter telescope, was launched in March of 2009 to detect and study extrasolar planets. Since then it has been staring at over 150,000 stars, ...

The most distant objects in the universe are also the oldest -- or at least that is how they appear to us, because their light has had to travel for billions of years to get here. They ar...

Cambridge, MA White dwarfs are the burned-out cores of stars like our Sun. Astronomers have discovered a pair of white dwarfs spiraling into one another at breakneck speeds. Today, these...

Galaxies frequently collide with one another. Our own Milky Way galaxy, for example, and its nearest giant neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, are heading towards each other at a rate of abou...

Please join us on Wednesday, July 20, at 8:00 pm, for a public lecture by Don Kurtz titled "The Real Music of the Spheres." This multimedia lecture will look at the relationship of musi...

On the Earth, dust particles are everywhere - under beds, on bookshelves, even floating in the air. We take dust for granted. Dust is also common in space, and it is found for example in...

Dr. Gaspar Bakos of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is the 2011 winner of the Maria and Eric Muhlmann Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. The Muhlmann ...

Supernovae are the explosive deaths of massive stars, cataclysms that disburse into space the chemical elements produced by nuclear reactions inside the progenitor stars. Understanding c...

A new star develops by accreting material from a circumstellar disk; both in turn are embedded in a much larger, more nearly spherical envelope of in-falling dust and gas. The protostar...