A brown dwarf, a star whose mass is less than about 8% of the sun's, lacks sufficient gravitational contraction to heat up its interior to the roughly ten million kelvin temperatures need...

Cambridge, MA NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has taken its first shots of the cosmos since warming up and starting its second career. The infrared telescope ran out of coolant on May 15,...

Dr. Giovanni G. Fazio, Senior Physicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, has been selected to receive the 2009 Secretary’s Distinguished Research Lecture Award of the Smithso...

One of the brightest stars in our galaxy is the aging, cool giant star NML Cygnus. It has a relatively enormous mass -- about forty times that of the sun -- and a luminosity nearly a mi...

Cambridge, MA A study published this week in the journal Nature offers an explanation for the origin of dwarf spheroidal galaxies. The research may settle an outstanding puzzle in unders...

Stars spin. The sun, for example, takes about twenty-five days to rotate, as can be seen by watching its dark sunspots move across the disk. Winds from stars, the sun included, play a r...

Washington, DC Ten years ago, on July 23, 1999, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory was launched aboard the space shuttle Columbia and deployed into orbit. Chandra has doubled its original ...

In fewer than ten million years the material in the circumstellar disk around a young star will either be accreted on to its star, dispersedinto the interstellar medium, or converted into...

Massive black holes -- ones that contain millions of solar masses of material -- or even supermassive black holes with billions of solar masses, are thought to reside at the centers of mo...

One new star is born somewhere in our Milky Way galaxy per year, on average, according to the current estimates. The stellar nurseries are located in giant clouds of molecular gas and dus...