Near Earth Objects (NEOs) are asteroids or comets whose orbits sometimes take them close to the earth's orbit. An NEO could therefore someday collide with the earth -- and there are almos...

Observatory Night lectures will take place on the third Thursday of the month from August to November. Topics will include the search forextraterrestrial intelligence, the formation of th...

The supermassive black holes that lie at the centers of galaxies can spawn tremendous bipolar jets of atomic particles. These outflows, discovered at radio wavelengths, are thought to be...

The Perseids are certainly the best known, if not the most active, meteor shower of the year. The experience of watching them, however, can vary widely. Of course the local weather can ma...

Water is critical to human life, but also plays an important role in the life of stars and their planetary systems. As a gas, water helps to cool collapsing clouds of interstellar materi...

Final update, Aug. 6, 11:00 a.m. EDT - Looks like our chances for additional aurora activity are zero. Although the Boston area didn't get any nice aurorae, plenty of other folks did. The...

Cambridge, MA Sky viewers might get to enjoy some spectacular Northern Lights, or aurorae, tomorrow. After a long slumber, the Sun is waking up. Early Sunday morning, the Sun's surface e...

Gamma rays are the most energetic form of light. They are typically produced in four ways: in extremely hot regions (temperatures of more than about 100 million degrees), when very fast ...

Cambridge, MA A hundred million years ago, a triple-star system was traveling through the bustling center of our Milky Way galaxy when it made a life-changing misstep. The trio wandered ...

(Written by Christine Pulliam, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, for Science at the Smithsonian, a website featuring highlights of scientific research at the Smithsonian Institution....