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 ...

The Milky Way alone probably contains hundreds of billions of planets, based on the thousands of exoplanets we’ve already identified. These planets share a history and origin with their host stars, ...

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 ...

Modern astronomy requires the best telescopes, detectors, spacecraft, and other equipment. The scientists, engineers, and staff of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian participate in ...

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 ...

Finding and describing new exoplanets using TESS and other observatories. TESS is designed to observe stars closer to the Solar System than those studied by other observatories, providing targets for ...

The SMA is a type of multiple-antenna observatory known as an interferometer, in this case consisting of eight radio dishes, each 6 meters in diameter. The eight antennas observe the same astronomical ...

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, ...

Large galaxies like the Milky Way formed out of mergers with smaller galaxies and by stealing some of their stars. Astronomers discovered that as many as 25% of galaxies are currently merging with ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...