We invite you to join us this Thursday, November 18 at 7:30 pm for a public lecture by Dr. Anna Frebel titled "Our Cosmic Relatives: The Oldest Stars in the Universe."

Cambridge, MA Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have found evidence of the youngest black hole known to exist in our cosmic neighborhood. The 30-year-old black hole prov...

In 1915, Einstein amazed the world by predicting that the path of light could be bent by mass. As a consequence, light from a distant galaxy passing by an intervening galaxy en route to ...

Cambridge, MA NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has unveiled a previously unseen structure centered in the Milky Way -- a finding likened in terms of scale to the discovery of a new...

Because all cosmic objects evolve with time, astronomers sometimes have a difficult time deciding if two sources that seem different are actually related but just in different stages of l...

The corona of the sun is the hot (over a million kelvin), gaseous outer region of its atmosphere. The corona is threaded by intense magnetic fields that extend upwards from the surface in...

SAO scientist Justin Kasper is one of three recipients of the second annual Smithsonian Institution Secretary’s Awards for Excellence. This yearly award recognizes individuals for their s...

The majority of extra-solar planets (about 278 of them) are more massive than Jupiter. About 20% of this majority group orbit their stars at a distances of less than one-tenth of an astro...

Cambridge, MA How do astronomers weigh a star that's trillions of miles away and way too big to fit on a bathroom scale? In most cases they can't, although they can get a best estimate u...

Of the nearly 500 extra-solar planets that have been confirmed to date, only about a dozen have actually been seen in images. Because planets are so much fainter than their host stars, s...