Our Milky Way home galaxy, like most galaxies, shines brightly in visible light because its stars are hot and emit at optical wavelengths. But twenty years ago the Infrared Astronomy Sat...

Cambridge, MA New research shows that black holes are not the ultimate destroyers that are often portrayed in popular culture. Instead, warm gas escaping from the clutches of enormous bl...

When a star like our Sun gets very old, after another seven billion years or so, it will no longer be able to burn its nuclear fuel. With only about half of the its mass remaining, it wi...

Cambridge, MA Astronomers have found the lowest mass white dwarf known in our galaxy: a Saturn-sized ball of helium containing only about one-fifth the mass of the Sun. In addition, they...

Astronomers have come to realize that black holes are fairly common in the universe. Massive black holes -- ones that contain millions or even billions of solar masses of material -- are ...

An "exoplanet" is an extra-solar planet -- a planet orbiting a star other than our own Sun. Over 120 exoplanets have been discovered in the past decade in a scientific revolution that has...

The small star with the long name of 2MASS-J1207334-393254 is about 179 light-years from Earth. It has a mass of only about twenty-four Jupiters, too little to be able to ignite hydrogen ...

Cambridge, MA A unique collaboration created by Harvard's Initiative for Innovative Computing (IIC) has brought together astronomers, medical imaging specialists, and software engineers ...

Cambridge, MA John P. Huchra of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has been elected the next President of the American Astronomical Society. "I'm honored and excited t...

Cambridge, MA Even though the sun is the closest star to Earth and has been studied for hundreds of years, it still holds surprises. The recently launched Hinode spacecraft is one of the...