The center of our Milky Way galaxy is located about twenty-five thousand light years from earth, in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius. It is invisible to us in optical lig...

Dr. Kate Kirby, Co-Director of the Institute for Theoretical, Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (ITAMP), has been appointed as the new Executive Officer of the American Physical Socie...

A "terrestrial" planet is a planet that is earth-like in the sense that it is roughly ten thousand kilometers in diameter and has a density of rock: about five grams per cubic centimeter ...

In its earliest years, the universe was so hot that electrons and protons could not stay together to form neutral atoms; matter was said to be in ionized form. But after 380,000 years,...

Cambridge, MA It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie: rogue black holes roaming our galaxy, threatening to swallow anything that gets too close. In fact, new calculations by Ryan O'Le...

Cambridge, MA Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, along with colleagues elsewhere in the United States and the United Kingdom, have discovered the most distan...

About eight billion years before our own sun formed, the universe underwent a period of dramatic star formation. Galaxy collisions were frequent back then, and those interactions prompted...

Astronomers are on the threshold of discovering the Holy Grail of planetary sciences - new Earth-like planets. The next challenge will be to determine whether or not these worlds have lif...

Supermasssive black holes - giants with masses of millions or billions of suns - are relatively famous because they reside at the nuclei of galaxies like quasars where they are responsibl...

On April 16, 2009, Lester M. Cohen was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service medal "...For your crucial and hugely significant role in the development of the lightweight telescope...