Cambridge, MA Since Galileo first pointed a telescope at the sky 400 years ago, a myriad of technological advances have allowed astronomers to look at very faint objects, very distant ob...

The "From Earth to the Universe" (FETTU) project -- a worldwide series of exhibitions featuring striking astronomical imagery -- has won the first Mani Bhaumik prize for excellence in ast...

Quasars are galaxies whose very bright cores are thought to contain massive black holes around which disks are actively accreting matter. The accretion process releases vast amounts of en...

Cambridge, MA Astronomers have combined a natural gravitational lens and a sophisticated telescope array to get the sharpest view ever of "star factories" in a galaxy over 10 billion lig...

According to current astronomical models, the Milky Way and other large galaxies formed over billions of years in a process that involved interactions between smaller galaxies, and in par...

The Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) is a NASA mission that arrived at Mars in September, 1997, and for nine years circled the planet every two hours in a polar orbit (that is, traveling from t...

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

Astronomers have made great strides recently in understanding how modest stars -- those like the sun or smaller -- are formed. Stars form from giant clouds of gas and dust in space as...

Cambridge, MA Astronomers have discovered a relic from the early universe - a star that may have been among the second generation of stars to form after the Big Bang. Located in the dwar...

Modern astronomy sometimes makes discoveries by looking in new places, the distant universe for example, using telescopes and instruments that extend the previous limits of detection. Bu...