SI Secretary Wayne Clough traveled to Las Campanas Observatory in Chile to explore Smithsonian's future role in astronomy. Accompanying Secretary Clough was Dr. Andrea Dupree (shown at r...

The very early stages of a new star's life are critical ones, both for the star itself and for its future planets (if any are to develop). The process of star formation, once thought to ...

Seyfert galaxies are similar to normal galaxies like our own Milky Way except in one critical respect: their nuclei are fantastically bright -- in extreme instances as luminous as 100 bi...

The center of our Milky Way galaxy is located about twenty-five thousand light years from earth, in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius. It is invisible to us in optical lig...

Dr. Kate Kirby, Co-Director of the Institute for Theoretical, Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (ITAMP), has been appointed as the new Executive Officer of the American Physical Socie...

A "terrestrial" planet is a planet that is earth-like in the sense that it is roughly ten thousand kilometers in diameter and has a density of rock: about five grams per cubic centimeter ...

In its earliest years, the universe was so hot that electrons and protons could not stay together to form neutral atoms; matter was said to be in ionized form. But after 380,000 years,...

Cambridge, MA It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie: rogue black holes roaming our galaxy, threatening to swallow anything that gets too close. In fact, new calculations by Ryan O'Le...

Cambridge, MA Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, along with colleagues elsewhere in the United States and the United Kingdom, have discovered the most distan...

About eight billion years before our own sun formed, the universe underwent a period of dramatic star formation. Galaxy collisions were frequent back then, and those interactions prompted...