Boston Children's Museum opens a new exhibit on Saturday, July 26, My Sky, funded by NASA and created through a partnership between Boston Children's Museum and Smithsonian Astrophysical ...

Cambridge, MA - Humanity is on the threshold of being able to detect signs of alien life on other worlds. By studying exoplanet atmospheres, we can look for gases like oxygen and metha...

Cambridge, MA - Fifteen years ago, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory was launched into space aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia. Since its deployment on July 23, 1999, Chandra has helped...

Cambridge, MA - Astronomers have discovered a transiting exoplanet with the longest known year. Kepler-421b circles its star once every 704 days. In comparison, Mars orbits our Sun onc...

Our Milky Way galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy, a flattened disk of stars, gas and dust about 100,000 light-years in diameter containing several hundred billion stars. About 0.5% of the...

The universe contains some galaxies more than a thousand times brighter than our own Milky Way galaxy. Many of them are practically invisible at optical wavelengths because the star form...

Cambridge, MA - Defining what makes a star "Sun-like" is as difficult as defining what makes a planet "Earth-like." A solar twin should have a temperature, mass, and spectral type simi...

Einstein's Theory of General Relativity predicts that accelerated masses emit gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time. Even though gravitational waves have yet to be detected direct...

Astronomers in the past decade have been able to examine some of the key physical processes underway in early stages of stellar gestation, thanks in part to submillimeter and infrared tel...

The nuclei of most galaxies contain a massive black hole. In our Milky Way, for example, the nuclear black hole contains about four million solar masses of material, and in other galaxies...