Cambridge, MA - What is a planet? For generations of kids the answer was easy. A big ball of rock or gas that orbited our Sun, and there were nine of them in our solar system. But then...

The Pleiades star cluster, a brilliant collection of several hundred stars visible in the winter sky near the constellation of Orion, has been admired by people for thousands of years; it...

A planet may be causing the star it orbits to act much older than it actually is, according to new data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. This discovery shows how a massive planet ca...

Observatory Night lectures will take place on the third Thursday of the month from September through November. We will also hold one on the first Thursday of December. These public talks ...

The Pipe Nebula is a prominent dark molecular cloud located about 430 light-years from us. It contains about ten thousand solar-masses of material, making it one of the closest giant mol...

On September 10, 2014, NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) satellite observed its largest solar flare since launching in June of 2013. This was an X1.6 class flare based o...

Cambridge, MA - Dr. Philip M. Sadler of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has been awarded the 2014 Technology and Innovation Award from the International Planetari...

A blazar is a galaxy whose central, supermassive black hole shines intensely as it accretes material from the surrounding region. Although black hole accretion happens in many galaxies a...

Cambridge, MA - Before iPhones and laptops there were human computers, some of whom worked at the Harvard College Observatory. Women like Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Williamina Fleming, an...

The Board of Directors of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization is pleased to announce the appointment of Edward I. Moses, Ph.D., as President of their organization. Dr. Moses, former...