The first phase of a star's formation are thought to begin deep inside a natal cloud of gas and dust. In the earliest stages, material coalesces under the influence of gravity into so-ca...

MicroObservatory is a network of automated telescopes that can be controlled over the Internet. They were developed by scientists and educators at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astro...

Ultraluminous infrared galaxies ((ULIRGs) are galaxies whose luminosity exceeds that of a trillion suns; for comparison, the Milky Way galaxy has a typical (and much more modest) luminosi...

The famous Orion Nebula is the closest nursery of massive young stars to the earth, and is about 1300 light-years away. The nebula is part of a giant molecular cloud that hosts several cl...

Cambridge, MA The constellation of Orion is a hotbed of massive star formation, most prominently in the Great Nebula that sits in Orion's sword. The glowing gas of the Nebula is powered...

The nucleus of an active galaxy, an AGN, contains a massive black hole that is vigorously accreting material. In the process it typically ejects jets of particles and radiates brightly a...

Astronomers have just published the discovery of the farthest known object in the cosmos: a star that exploded when the universe was only 630 million years old -- only 4.6% of its current...

Cambridge, MA Nearly 100 years ago, scientists detected the first signs of cosmic rays - subatomic particles (mostly protons) that zip through space at nearly the speed of light. The mos...

Stars, the most familiar objects in the night sky, make up only a tiny percentage of the total amount of matter in the universe -- about 2%. Another approximately 8% of the matter is in ...

The Orion Nebula is one of the most beautiful sights of the winter night sky, its gas and dust glowing from the intense ultraviolet radiation ofa cluster of massive young stars. At 1300 l...