The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian Solar, Stellar & Planetary Sciences (SSP) division research is directed toward understanding star and planet formation and the physical processes in ...

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 ...

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 ...

Matter and energy are the two basic components of the entire Universe. An enormous challenge for scientists is that most of the matter in the Universe is invisible and the source of most of the energy ...

Cambridge, MA– In October 2018, a small star was ripped to shreds when it wandered too close to a black hole in a galaxy located 665 million light years away from Earth. Though it may sound thrilling, ...

The Sun may be the nearest star, but there’s still a lot we don’t understand about it. One of the larger mysteries is the solar corona: the tenuous outermost atmosphere that’s only visible to the ...

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 ...

Until now, astronomers have found all other known exoplanets and exoplanet candidates in the Milky Way galaxy, almost all less than about 3,000 light-years from Earth. Cambridge, MA-- Signs of a ...

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 ...

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration has conducted test observations achieving the highest resolution ever obtained from the surface of the Earth, by detecting light from the centers of ...

The center of our Milky Way galaxy lies about 27,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius. At its core is a black hole about four million solar masses in size. Around ...

Supernovas are some of the brightest events in the universe, occasionally outshining entire galaxies at their peak. Many supernovas can be seen from billions of light-years away, and nearby supernovas ...