'Space butterfly' is home to hundreds of baby stars

What looks like a red butterfly in space is in reality a nursery for hundreds of baby stars, revealed in this infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Officially named Westerhout 40 (W40), the butterfly is a nebula—a ...

Astronomers find spark of star birth across billions of years

Astronomers have completed the largest and most detailed study of what triggers stars to form in the universe's biggest galaxies, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes. They were surprised to find that ...

Faint glow within galaxy clusters illuminates dark matter

A new look at Hubble images of galaxies could be a step toward illuminating the elusive nature of dark matter, the unobservable material that makes up the majority of the universe, according to a study published online today ...

Heavyweight in the heart of the Abell 85 central galaxy

In space, black holes appear in different sizes and masses. The record is now held by a specimen in the Abell 85 cluster of galaxies, where an ultra-massive black hole with 40 billion times the mass of our sun sits in the ...

Discovery of periodic tables for molecules

The periodic table of elements was proposed in 1869, and thereafter became one of the cornerstones of the natural sciences. This table was designed to contain all the elements found in nature in a special layout that groups ...

On-demand, photonic entanglement synthesizer

Quantum information protocols are based on a variety of entanglement modes such as Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR), Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) and other cluster states. For on-demand preparation, these states can be ...

Astronomers discover new galaxy clusters hiding in plain sight

MIT astronomers have discovered new and unusual galactic neighborhoods that previous studies overlooked. Their results, published today, suggest that roughly 1 percent of galaxy clusters look atypical and can be easily misidentified ...

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