Pluto is the largest known body belonging to the Kuiper Belt, an orbiting disk of small objects that extends roughly from the orbit of Neptune to fifty AU from the Sun (one AU is the aver...

Since Edwin Hubble proposed his galaxy classification scheme in 1926, numerous studies have investigated the physical mechanisms responsible for the shapes of spiral and elliptical galaxi...

In biology, "symbiosis" refers to two organisms that live close to and interact with one another. Astronomers have long studied a class of stars — called symbiotic stars — that co-exist i...

The Orion molecular cloud is a large complex of hot young stars, nebulae, and dark clouds of gas and dust located in the constellation of Orion. Two particularly famous sights in the nig...

Cambridge, MA - Did our Sun have a twin when it was born 4.5 billion years ago?Almost certainly yes -- though not an identical twin. And so did every other Sun-like star in the univers...

Cambridge, MA - For decades, scientists believed that the magnetic field lines coursing around newly forming stars were both powerful and unyielding, working like jail bars to corral s...

Supermassive black holes containing millions or even billions of solar-masses of material are found at the nuclei of almost all galaxies. Our Milky Way, for example, has a nucleus with a ...

Austin, TX - A newly discovered Jupiter-like world is so hot that it’s stretching the definition of the word "planet."With a day-side temperature of 4,600 Kelvin (more than 7,800 degre...

The more stars a typical spiral galaxy contains, the faster it makes new ones. Astronomers call this relatively tight correlation the "galaxy main sequence." The main sequence might be ...

Cambridge, MA - Astronomers at The University of Texas at Austin and Harvard University have put a basic principle of black holes to the test, showing that matter completely vanishes w...