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, ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

JADES will use guaranteed time in James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) cycle 1 to produce infrared imaging and spectroscopy of unprecedented depth in the two premier extragalactic deep fields, ...

Gould’s Belt is a long chain of clouds in the Milky Way comprised of stellar nurseries and hot young stars. Stretching across a substantial part of the night sky, Gould’s Belt includes the Orion ...

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 Galileo Project for the Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts ...