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Antennae: A Galactic Spectacle

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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 ...

Water-Ice Super-Earths

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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...

Pulverized Planet Dust Might Lie Around Double Stars

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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...

Sizes for Potentially Dangerous Asteroids

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Near Earth Objects (NEOs) are asteroids or comets whose orbits sometimes take them close to the earth's orbit. An NEO could therefore someday collide with the earth -- and there are almos...

Fall Public Events Now Online

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Observatory Night lectures will take place on the third Thursday of the month from August to November. Topics will include the search forextraterrestrial intelligence, the formation of th...

X-Ray Jets

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The supermassive black holes that lie at the centers of galaxies can spawn tremendous bipolar jets of atomic particles. These outflows, discovered at radio wavelengths, are thought to be...

Perseids at their Best

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The Perseids are certainly the best known, if not the most active, meteor shower of the year. The experience of watching them, however, can vary widely. Of course the local weather can ma...

Water around Massive Young Stars

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Water is critical to human life, but also plays an important role in the life of stars and their planetary systems. As a gas, water helps to cool collapsing clouds of interstellar materi...

Aurora Update

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Final update, Aug. 6, 11:00 a.m. EDT - Looks like our chances for additional aurora activity are zero. Although the Boston area didn't get any nice aurorae, plenty of other folks did. The...

Aurora Alert: The Sun is Waking Up!

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Cambridge, MA Sky viewers might get to enjoy some spectacular Northern Lights, or aurorae, tomorrow. After a long slumber, the Sun is waking up. Early Sunday morning, the Sun's surface e...
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