FILE – The Milky Way appears over the Valle de la Luna in the Atacama Desert, considered the driest place on Earth, near San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. Three undergraduate students in an astronomy class ...

Anna Frebel can’t explain her fascination with the stars. It’d be like explaining why “berry purple-pink” is one of her favorite colors. “They are just a part of me,” says Frebel, an astronomer at MIT ...

Researchers hold a binder full of data about stars that they have collected over the years, including star brightness over time. From left to right: Ananda Santos, Casey Fienberg, and Anna Frebel. MIT ...

Researchers at MIT found three of the oldest stars in the universe orbiting around the outskirts of the Milky Way Galaxy, according to a study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal ...

To find the universe’s oldest stars, you must look for the ones with low chemical abundances and a retrograde orbit. That’s what a group of students in a class of MIT professor of physics and division ...

MIT researchers and students found a trio of stars from 12 to 13 billion years ago in the Milky Way's halo. Share on Facebook (opens in a new window) Share on X (opens in a new window) Share on Reddit ...

"They're all quite fast — hundreds of kilometers per second, going the wrong way." When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Astronomers ...

Anna Frebel, trans. from the German by Ann M. Hentschel. Princeton Univ., $29.95 (352p) ISBN 978-0-691-16506-6 German-born astronomer Frebel, an assistant professor of physics at MIT, makes this crash ...