Astronomers have long realized that the process of making new stars is very inefficient. In the Milky Way the overall efficiency is only about 5% as measured by the mass in stars compared...

Cambridge, MA - Last April, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) sparked international excitement when it unveiled the first image of a black hole. Today, a team of researchers have publish...

Cambridge, MA - Scientists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have, for the first time, measured the orbital tilt of an exoplanet younger than 45 million years. W...

About eighty-five percent of the matter in the universe is in the form of dark matter, whose nature remains a mystery, and the rest is of the kind found in atoms. Dark matter exhibits gra...

Star formation takes place within natal clouds of dust and gas that absorb much of the emitted ultraviolet and optical radiation but which also block these regions from optical view. In r...

The Gould Belt is an expanding ring of young stars, gas and dust situated about a thousand light-years from the Sun - which is to say, in our solar neighborhood. It stretches over a few t...

The formation of stars involves the complex interactions of many phenomena, including gravitational collapse, magnetic fields, turbulence, stellar feedback, and cloud rotation. The balanc...

Roughly 380,000 years after the big bang, about 13.7 billion years ago, matter (mostly hydrogen) cooled enough for neutral atoms to form, and light was able to traverse space freely. That...

Cambridge, MA - Scientists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) have completed the Extremely Low Mass--also known as ELM--spectroscopic study of white dwarf s...

Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies that are accreting material onto their hot circumnuclear disks, releasing the energy in bursts of radi...