Cambridge, MA The Perseus spiral arm - the nearest spiral arm in the Milky Way outside the Sun's orbit - lies only half as far from Earth as some previous studies had suggested. An inter...

Cambridge, MA The signs of the holidays are all around us - wreaths on doors, twinkling lights in windows, and decorated trees in living rooms. Even outer space is joining the year-end c...

Cambridge, MA A team of astronomers has found faint visible echoes of three ancient supernovae by detecting their centuries-old light as it is reflected by clouds of interstellar gas hun...

Cambridge, MA Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered a remarkably small brown dwarf surrounded by a dusty disk. The brown dwarf contains only about 8 times the ...

Cambridge, MA A ring often serves as the visible symbol of the unseen - be it mystical, Lord of the Rings-style power or the devotion between two people. In space, a ring of light is mor...

Cambridge, MA Just in time for Thanksgiving, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has harvested a bounty of young stars. A new infrared image of the reflection nebula NGC 1333, located about 1...

Cambridge, MA A new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveals billowing mountains of dust ablaze with the fires of stellar youth. Captured by Spitzer's infrared eyes, the majest...

Cambridge, MA Hubble's iconic images include many shots of cosmic clouds of gas and dust called nebulae. For example, the famous "Pillars of Creation" mark the birthplace of new stars wi...

Cambridge, MA In an exercise that demonstrates the power of a multiwavelength investigation using diverse facilities, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA)...

Cambridge, MA Common wisdom holds that we can never see a black hole because nothing can escape it - not even light. Fortunately, black holes aren't completely black. As gas is pulled in...