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...

Dr. Philip M. Sadler of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has been awarded the 2010 American Astronomical Society's Education Prize. This award recognizes outstanding contri...

Many, perhaps even most stars, are members of binaries -- two stars that orbit each other. Symbiotic stars are a small subset of binaries with an attitude: they display characteristic, d...

The Atlas V roared to life Thursday morning, February 11, to send the Solar Dynamics Observatory into space on its mission to evaluate the complex mechanisms of the sun. Liftoff came on-t...