Cambridge, MA Astronomers announced today that they have discovered a "super-Earth" orbiting a red dwarf star 40 light-years from Earth. They found the distant planet with a small fleet ...

Cambridge, MA About 550 light-years from Earth, a star like our Sun is writhing in its death throes. Chi Cygni has swollen in size to become a red giant star so large that it would swall...

The corona is the hot outer region of the sun's atmosphere. The corona is threaded by magnetic fields that loop and twist upwards from the sun's surface, driven by motions of its dense at...

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...