The Hinode (Japanese for "sunrise") satellite was launched last September to study the sun's magnetic field, and how its explosive energy propagates through the different layers of the so...

Cambridge, MA Astronomers have found the best evidence yet of matter spiraling outward from a young, still-forming star in fountain-like jets. Due to the spiral motion, the jets help the...

Markarian galaxies were discovered and cataloged by the Russian astronomer Biniamin Markarian and his colleagues starting in the early 1960's. These galaxies are unusual in that they appe...

Cambridge, MA A furious rate of star formation discovered in a distant galaxy shows that galaxies in the early universe developed either much faster or in a different way from what astro...

Quasars are galaxies with massive black holes at their cores, around which vast amounts of energy are being radiated. So much light is emitted that the nucleus is much brighter than the r...

Cambridge, MA

One of the goals of modern astronomy is to better understand how stars form -- knowledge that will help us model how own sun behaves and will evolve, and how the earth formed as well. A...

Disk galaxies are highly flattened, roughly circular galaxies, that are shaped like a disk. Some, like our Milky Way, have majestic arms spiraling outward from their centers, while other...

Cambridge, MA Comet 17P/Holmes, which dazzled sky watchers with a dramatic outburst that made it visible to the unaided eye, now is fading from sight. However, before it returns to the o...

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 about five grams per cubic centimeter (abou...