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 ...

Looking for hidden structures and unusual stars that reveal the Milky Way’s history. Since our galaxy grew by merging with and eating other galaxies, traces of that violent past are visible in the ...

Capturing the first image of a supermassive black hole using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). This image of the black hole at the center of the nearby galaxy M87 reveals how gravitation affects the ...

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team of researchers led the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have discovered chemical fingerprints of gigantic primordial stars ...

For the first 380,000 years or so after the Big Bang, the entire universe was a hot soup of particles and photons, too dense for light to travel very far. However, as the cosmos expanded, it cooled ...

Black holes are some of the most fascinating and mind-bending objects in the cosmos. The very thing that characterizes a black hole also makes it hard to study: its intense gravity. All the mass in a ...

Interstellar space — the region between stars inside a galaxy — is home to clouds of gas and dust. This interstellar medium contains primordial leftovers from the formation of the galaxy, detritus ...

Mapping the structure of galaxy clusters using the hot plasma that fills the space between galaxies. Even though this plasma’s density is low, its temperature can reach hundreds of millions of degrees ...

The Milky Way is our galactic home, part of the story of how we came to be. Astronomers have learned that it’s a large spiral galaxy, similar to many others, but also different in ways that reflect ...

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 ...

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 ...

About 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang gave rise to everything, everywhere, and everywhen—the entire known Universe. What caused the Big Bang? What happened that first moment at the beginning of ...