Stellar Heartbeats
The Kepler satellite is famous for its discovery of thousands of exoplanets by continuously and meticulously measuring the brightnesses of over half-a-million stars for the signatures of ...
Optical Identification of Gamma-Ray Blazars
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Blazars are galaxies whose central, supermassive black holes are accreting material from surrounding regions and emitting powerful beams of high velocity charged particles that coincident...
A Rare Look at the Surface of a Rocky Exoplanet
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With an 11-hour orbit around its parent star, the hot planet most likely has no atmosphere, and may be covered in dark lava rock, according to data from the IRAC camera o...
Spotting Merging Galaxies
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Over thirty years ago, the Infrared Astronomy Satellite discovered that the universe contained many extremely luminous galaxies, some more than a thousand times brighter than our own Milk...
Scientists Observe the Explosion of a Monster Star Requiring New Supernova Mechanism
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Scientists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have announced the discovery of the most massive star ever known to be destroyed by a supernova expl...
Modeling a Core Collapse Supernova
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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...
Looking for Warm Dark Matter
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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...
A Stellar Stream in the Milky Way Provides Evidence of Dark Substructure
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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...
Imaging a Young, Planet-Forming Disk
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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...
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary
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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...