Cambridge, MA - New images from the Smithsonian's Submillimeter Array (SMA) telescope provide the most detailed view yet of stellar nurseries within the Snake nebula. These images offe...

Astronomer Robert Wilson lifted his fingers to make air quotes around "problem." The Nobel laureate's problem occurred 50 years ago and would help explain the origins of the universe. In ...

Our Milky Way galaxy, like most galaxies, has a nucleus with a massive black hole. Our nuclear black hole contains about four million solar masses of material, but others are thought to h...

Dr. Christine Jones, Director of the Consortium for Unlocking the Mysteries of the Universe and Senior Astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, will receive the 2013 S...

Black holes with masses of millions or even billions of suns appear to reside at the nuclei of galaxies. In dramatic cases like quasars they are thought to be responsible for the spectac...

Harvard graduate student in astronomy Sarah Rugheimer has been selected as one of eight Harvard Horizon Scholars for 2014. Rugheimer is a participant in Harvard’s Origins of Life Initiati...

A maser, like a laser, is a source of bright electromagnetic radiation, with the difference being that maser radiation is not optical light but rather longer wavelength, microwave radiati...

Astrophysicist Margaret J. Geller of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) will receive this year's Karl Schwarzschild Medal of the German Astronomical Society (Astronomis...

Star formation lights up a galaxy because many newly formed stars are massive, hot and bright. These young stars are made in dusty clouds of material that obscure their visible light, an...

Cambridge, MA - Our solar system seems like a neat and orderly place, with small, rocky worlds near the Sun and big, gaseous worlds farther out, all eight planets following orbital pat...