The center of our Milky Way galaxy, about twenty-five thousand light years from Earth, is invisible to us in optical light because of the extensive amounts of absorbing, intervening dust....

We're pleased to announce that the full schedule of upcoming public programs is now available. This spring's Observatory Night talks will examine some of astronomy's biggest mysteries, li...

Super-massive black holes at the centers of galaxies can spawn tremendous bipolar jets when matter in the vicinity forms a hot, accreting disk around the black hole. The rapidly moving ch...

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is a typical barred spiral galaxy, a flattened disk of about a hundred billion stars, gas, and dust that is roughly one hundred thousand light-years in di...

Smithsonian astronomer Dr. Kathy Reeves will receive the 2016 Karen Harvey Prize "for her work elucidating the energetics of solar flares and coronal mass ejections, for her leadership wi...

Cambridge, MA - In April 2015, after traveling for about half the age of the universe, a flood of powerful gamma rays from a distant galaxy slammed into Earth's atmosphere. That torren...

A newborn star typically has a disk of gas and dust from which planets develop as the dust grains collide, stick together and grow. Stars older than about five million years lack evidence...

Supernovae, the explosive deaths of massive stars, are among the most momentous events in the cosmos because they disburse into space all of the chemical elements that were produced insid...

Cambridge, MA - Astronomers have made a significant step toward confirming a proposed explanation for how solar flares accelerate charged particles to speeds nearly that of light. This...

Cambridge, MA -