Stars greater than eight solar-masses end their lives spectacularly -- as supernovae. These single-star supernovae are called core collapse supernovae because when their dense cores (at t...

In the last century, astronomers studying the motions of galaxies and the character of the cosmic microwave background radiation came to realize that most of the matter in the universe wa...

Cambridge, MA - Cambridge, MA (July 26, 2019)—Scientists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have observed what may be evidence of dark matter interfering with a s...

Protoplanetary disks are a natural product of the star formation process. As material in a pre-stellar condensation collapses to form the central star, angular momentum conservation promp...

Cambridge, MA - On July 23, 1999, the Space Shuttle Columbia blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center carrying the Chandra X-ray Observatory. In the two decades that have passed, Chandr...

Cambridge, MA - A team of astronomers led by the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have updated and confirmed self-lensing binary star KOI-3278's companion to be a whit...

All atoms and molecules emit distinctive spectral lines across the spectrum, the details of which depend on the internal structures of the species (for example, the vibration and rotation...

The universe, perhaps surprisingly, is not comprised of galaxies randomly distributed throughout space; that is, it is not very homogeneous. Instead, its galaxies are clustered into disti...

On July 2, scientists from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) successfully flew a high-altitude research...

Giovanni Fazio has been awarded the 2019 SPIE George W. Goddard Award in Space and Airborne Optics "in recognition of his exceptional achievements in the area of infrared instruments span...