The Outer Space Treaty bars any nation — and by extension, corporation — from owning property on a celestial body, but a loophole in the pact may amount to the same thing, warns a Harvard...

NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will launch September 2016 and travel to the near-Earth asteroid Bennu to harvest a sample of surface material and return it to Earth for study. But before th...

Most galaxies lie in clusters, groupings of a few to many thousands of galaxies. Our Milky Way galaxy itself is a member of the Local Group, a band of about fifty galaxies whose other lar...

Yeilanise Noriega, a sixth-grader at Jackson/Mann K-8 School, recently experienced a course that changed her world perspective exponentially — so much so that she is now convinced life ex...

Counting up the number of objects of different kinds can help distinguish between models of how they form and evolve. Astronomers have traditionally used number counts of radio sources to...

Cambridge, MA - Astronomers Aaron Smith and Volker Bromm of The University of Texas at Austin, working with Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, have discovered...

The star forming molecular clump W43-MM1 is very massive and dense, containing about 2100 solar-masses of material in a region only one-third of a light-year across (for comparison, the n...

At the heart of our galaxy's center is SagA*, a supermassive black hole containing about four million solar-masses of material. SgrA* is relatively faint, unlike the supermassive black ho...

The hunt for Earth-like planets has intensified as scientists search for potential life on other worlds.Now one of the leading exoplanet hunters is being recognized for his contributions ...

Cambridge, MA - Today astronomers are announcing the discovery of the youngest known planet, only 11 million years old, which transits its star once every 5.4 days. The MEarth-North an...