When a star with a mass of roughly ten solar masses finishes its life, it does so in a spectacular explosion known as a supernova, leaving behind as remnant "ash" a neutron star. Neutron ...

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered two spectacular rings of molecules encircling the young, Sun-like star IM Lup. The rings are made...

Cambridge, MA - The center of our Milky Way galaxy is a mysterious place. Not only is it thousands of light-years away, it's also cloaked in so much dust that most stars within are ren...

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

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

The Big Bang was not the moment of creation. The real moment of creation came 100 million years later. The cosmic dawn: The moment the first stars were born.The moment that lit up the uni...

Most galaxies are members of a cluster, a grouping of several to thousands of galaxies. Our Milky Way, for example, is a member of the "Local Group," a set of about fifty galaxies whose ...

Recently crowned the "astronomy photo of the year" by Slate's Bad Astronomy blog, a new image of a region of Orion's belt reveals the deepest look yet into this part of space by piercing ...

In the 1980's, observations of nearby galaxies made with the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, along with observations of the far-infrared/submillimeter background with the Cosmic Backgrou...

Cambridge, MA - We only have one example of a planet with life: Earth. But within the next generation, it should become possible to detect signs of life on planets orbiting distant sta...