Globular clusters are roughly spherical ensembles of stars, as many as a million stars in some cases, that are gravitationally bound together in groups whose diameters can be as small as ...

Quasars are galaxies with massive black holes at their cores around which vast amounts of energy are being radiated -- quasars are among the most powerful energy sources known. Streaming ...

When a supernova explodes, its blast sweeps up surrounding gas with a powerful shock wave. A typical supernova shock has more energy in the motions of its material than the Sun will emit ...

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...