A newly-formed star usually has a disk of gas and dust around it. This disk (the source of possible future planets) can generate intense X-ray radiation as its material falls onto the st...

Eleven years ago this winter two teams of astronomers, one of them led by CfA scientists, astonished the world with their announcement that the universe would expand forever. They soon ad...

Cambridge, MA For the first time, astronomers have clearly seen the effects of "dark energy" on the most massive collapsed objects in the universe using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory....

The second brightest object in the sky outside of our solar system is the variable star CW Leo, located about 450 light-years away in the direction of the constellation of Leo (the bright...

Of the 300 or so extra-solar planets known, twenty-eight have been found because they transit their star (that is, their orbits take them in front of their star as seen from earth). An ex...

Cambridge, MA Astronomers have uncovered strong evidence that brown dwarfs form like stars. Using the Smithsonian's Submillimeter Array (SMA), they detected molecules of carbon monoxide ...

Ultraluminous infrared galaxies ("ULIRGs") shine with the luminosity of one hundred or more Milky Way galaxies. Their most striking feature, however, is not their tremendous energy outpu...

Cambridge, MA

The universe contains many fabulously luminous galaxies, some of them more than a thousand times brighter than our own Milky Way. Most of them are practically invisible at optical wavele...

New stars tend to form with disks of gas and dust around them. After a few hundred thousand years or so, the intense ultraviolet radiation from the most massive of these stars has expell...