Cambridge, MA When NASA’s Solar Probe Plus (SPP) launches before the end of the decade, it will carry a suite of cutting-edge scientific instruments. Only one – the Solar Wind Electrons ...

Cambridge, MA Beyond the orbit of Neptune reside countless icy rocks known as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). One of the biggest, Pluto, is classified as a dwarf planet. The region also ...

Massive stars -- those with more than about eight times the mass of the sun -- are arguably the most important actors in the universe. Much hotter and more luminous than the sun, they liv...

Cambridge, MA Volcanoes display the awesome power of Nature like few other events. Earlier this year, ash from an Icelandic volcano disrupted air travel throughout much of northern Europ...

The universe was created 13.73 billion years ago in a blaze of light -- the big bang. We also think that, about 380,000 years later, after matter (mostly hydrogen atoms) had cooled enoug...

New research from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveals that asteroids somewhat near Earth, termed near-Earth objects, are a mixed bunch, with a surprisingly wide array of compositions. ...

Cambridge, MA NASA's Kepler Mission has discovered the first confirmed planetary system with more than one planet transiting the same star.Today's announcement of the discovery of the tw...

A beautiful new image of two colliding galaxies has been released by NASA's Great Observatories. The Antennae galaxies, located about 62 million light years from Earth, are shown in this ...

A "super-Earth" is a planet around another star (an "exoplanet") whose mass is less than about ten times that of the Earth. Of the 480 or so extrasolar planets now known, most have masses...

Cambridge, MA Tight double-star systems might not be the best places for life to spring up, according to a new study using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The infrared observat...