The 212 currently identified extrasolar planets (that is, planets around stars other than our Sun) have known masses and orbits, but they are otherwise rather mysterious objects. For exam...

Cambridge, MA Note to editors: This release was issued jointly with the Space Telescope Science Institute. Twenty years ago, astronomers witnessed one of the brightest stellar explosions...

Cambridge, MA A team of astronomers led by Carl Grillmair (Spitzer Science Center) and David Charbonneau (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) announced today that they have dire...

Oxygen is obviously one of the gases we care most about here on Earth, and so it is not surprising that astronomers have been trying for over fifty years to determine its abundance in the...

The star Gamma Cephei is about thirty-eight light-years from Earth, readily visible in the sky roughly between Polaris (the North Star) and the "chair" in Cassiopeia. Astronomer's have su...

More than about half of all stars roughly similar to the Sun or larger (in mass) are part of multiple systems -- binary stars, or even triplets, that orbit around one another. This tenden...

Gamma ray bursts (GRBs), the brightest events in the known universe, are flashes of high-energy light that occur about once a day, randomly, from around the sky. While a burst is underway...

Supernovae, the explosive deaths of massive stars, disburse into space all of the chemical elements that were spawned inside the progenitor stars. Furthermore, these violent explosions th...

The two most prominent, nearby galaxies to our Milky Way are the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). They lie about 160,000 light-years away, in the outskir...

Seattle, WA The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) are two of the Milky Way's closest neighboring galaxies. Both are visible only in the southern hemisphere. B...