National Harbor, MD - Astronomers have unveiled an explosive cosmic fireworks display of stars interacting with their environment. This dazzling spectacle – due to powerful winds flowing from the ...

An international team of scientists, including multiple astronomers from CfA, have made the first-ever detection of a mid-IR flare from Sgr A*. National Harbor, MD - Using the James Webb Space ...

Stars have a life cycle: they’re born, they pass through middle age, and they die. The birth of a star determines much of how it lives that life. For that reason, researchers study star-forming ...

Humans have studied the stars for thousands of years. To many cultures, stars were the metaphor for constancy, while everything else moved and changed. Modern stellar astronomy showed that stars do ...

Stars are often gregarious things. Based on observation and theoretical models, many stars are born in clusters — groups of ten or more stars that were formed from the same interstellar cloud. The ...

Everything you’ve ever seen or experienced on Earth was once a nebulous collection of floating gas and dust. Science is starting to understand how those particles came to take the forms you recognize ...

From its establishment in 1966 as the Smithsonian Mount Hopkins Observatory, FLWO has hosted a world-class suite of telescopes designed for a wide variety of purposes. The largest visible-light ...

How can we expand the limits of human knowledge further into the unknown? The Center for Astrophysics is a collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Harvard College ...

After the Big Bang, the entire universe was hot, dense, and opaque, so we have no observable light from the first era of cosmic history. The change happened around 400,000 years after the Big Bang, ...

Measuring the mass of a distant exoplanet requires tracking the changes in light of the host star as the planet’s gravity tugs it slightly — a delicate process. The High Accuracy Radial velocity ...

Four Planets in One View! Each evening this month, enjoy a sweeping view of four bright planets at once. Also look for a close approach of Venus and Saturn, Mars occulted by the Moon, and meteors! Cue ...

Scientific investigations at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian cover the full spectrum of astronomy and astrophysics, and are organized into divisions, scientific departments, and ...