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 ...

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 ...

The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian follows the Smithsonian Institution's Open Access (CC0) policy. Our digital assets are in the public domain and are thus free of copyright ...

Cambridge, MA - The missing ingredient for cooking up stars has been spotted for the first time by astronomers. Much like a pressure cooker has a weight on top of its lid to keep the pressure in, ...

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 Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian High Energy Astrophysics division focuses on X-ray astronomy and instrumentation involved in observations of high-energy sources. This research aims ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...