Abell 1033 is a cluster of over 350 galaxies located about 1.7 billion light-years away. Collisions between galaxies in clusters are common events, and each merger heats and shocks the n...

Cambridge, MA - We know of about two dozen runaway stars, and have even found one runaway star cluster escaping its galaxy forever. Now, astronomers have spotted 11 runaway galaxies th...

Luke Skywalker's home in "Star Wars" is the desert planet Tatooine, with twin sunsets because it orbits two stars. So far, only uninhabitable gas-giant planets have been identified circli...

The universe was created 13.7 billion years ago in a blaze of light: the big bang. Roughly 380,000 years later, after matter (mostly hydrogen) had cooled enough for neutral atoms to for...

Cambridge, MA - NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has teamed up with a telescope on the ground to find a remote gas planet about 13,000 light-years away, making it one of the most distant...

Become an astronomer for a day! Enjoy telescope tours, interactive multimedia exhibits, hands-on activities, live demonstrations, prizes, and our ever-popular Scientist Cafe, where visito...

Astronomers have known for decades that the merger of two normal stars is a frequent and astronomically important phenomenon. In globular clusters, for example, with as many as several m...

Cambridge, MA - For the first time, astronomers have detected the presence of complex organic molecules, the building blocks of life, in a protoplanetary disk surrounding a young star,...

The distance to celestial objects is key to calculating their intrinsic properties like mass and luminosity. Distance, unfortunately, is also one of the most difficult parameters to meas...

Cambridge, MA - Stars form when gravity pulls together material within giant clouds of gas and dust. But gravity isn't the only force at work. Both turbulence and magnetic fields battl...