Dr. Philip M. Sadler of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has been awarded the 2010 American Astronomical Society's Education Prize. This award recognizes outstanding contri...

Many, perhaps even most stars, are members of binaries -- two stars that orbit each other. Symbiotic stars are a small subset of binaries with an attitude: they display characteristic, d...

The Atlas V roared to life Thursday morning, February 11, to send the Solar Dynamics Observatory into space on its mission to evaluate the complex mechanisms of the sun. Liftoff came on-t...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...