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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Venus blazes at its brightest for the year after sunset, then Mars and Jupiter to rule the night amid the menagerie of bright winter stars. The Moon’s many engagements, what’s the right term for a ...

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 ...

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 ...