What Do Students Know?
Black holes, frozen worlds, the "big bang," supernovae -- when it comes to telling strange and compelling stories, astronomy and space science educators can draw upon these and other deni...
X-Ray Emission from Young Stars
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The star TW Hydrae is located about 150 light-years from earth in the direction of the constellation of Hydrae, the Water Snake. This star is relatively young -- at about 10 million years...
Dr. Anna Frebel Wins Annie Jump Cannon Prize
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Dr. Anna Frebel of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has been awarded the 2010 Annie Jump Cannon prize of the American Astronomical Society for "outstanding research and pro...
The Cosmic Distance Scale
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In 1908, Harvard astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt discovered that a class of stars called Cepheids have brightnesses that vary regularly with periods that are directly related to their i...
Astronomers Find Rare Beast by New Means
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Cambridge, MA
For the first time, astronomers have found a supernova explosion with properties similar to a gamma-ray burst, but without seeing any gamma rays from it. The discovery, usi...
Margaret Geller Receives the James Craig Watson Medal of the National Academy of Sciences
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Dr. Margaret Geller of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has received the James Craig Watson Medal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for her extraordinary lifetime s...
Water Planets
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Of the roughly 420 extra-solar planets now known, about a dozen are in the newly named category of "super-earths," planets whose masses are in between of two and about fifteen earth-mass...
Dense Gas in Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies
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Ultraluminous infrared galaxies have luminosities that exceed a trillion suns. (For comparison, the Milky Way's luminosity is only that of about ten billion suns.) Extreme infrared activ...
Margaret Geller Receives the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the AAS
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Dr. Margaret Geller of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has received the 2010 Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the American Astronomical Society for her lifetime of work...
Surveying the X-ray Sky
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Astronomers have only modest laboratories to probe the mysteries of the cosmos. Mostly they have to rely on meticulous and clever observations of remote phenomena. Identifying the most in...