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...

Comet Tempel 1, discovered in 1867 by the German astronomer Wilhelm Tempel, orbits the sun every 5.5 years. In the summer of 2005, when it returned from its travels in the outer solar sys...

A supernova marks the explosive death of a massive star. The cataclysm disburses into space all of the chemical elements that were spawned inside the progenitor star, making supernovae th...

Cambridge, MA In an unprecedented flurry of honors, three astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) have been recognized for their innovative work by three lea...