Black Holes Exhibit Lives on at SAC Museum

AstroAI is a institute dedicated to the development of artificial intelligence to enable next generation astrophysics at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. Learn More

The Harvard Astronomical Glass Plate Collection is an archive of roughly 500,000 images of the sky preserved on glass photographic plates, the way professional astronomers often captured images in the era before the dominance of digital technology. These plates are more than historical curiosities: they provide over a century’s worth of data that can be used by contemporary astronomers to trace how objects in the night sky change over periods from years to decades.

For that reason, the DASCH (Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard) team are working to digitize the plates for digital storage and analysis. The process can also lead to new discoveries in old images, particularly of events that change over time, such as variable stars, novas, or black hole flares. 

GMACS - Moderate Dispersion Optical Spectrograph for the Giant Magellan Telescope is a powerful optical spectrograph that will unlock the power of the Giant Magellan Telescope for research ranging from the formation of stars and planets to cosmology.

For Scientists

The Sensing the Dynamic Universe (SDU) project creates sonified videos exploring the multitude of celestial variables such as stars, supernovae, quasars, gamma ray bursts and more. We sonify lightcurves and spectra, making the astrophysics of variables and transients accessible to the general public, with particular attention to accessibility for those with visual and/or neurological differences.

SDU Website

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory is a groundbreaking space telescope, with abilities beyond anything that came before it. The Chandra Multiwavelength Project (ChaMP) and Chandra Multiwavelength Plane (ChaMPlane) Survey exploit those abilities to catalog the variety of X-ray sources within archival Chandra data, with follow-up using other telescopes in other parts of the spectrum of light. The surveys identified previously unknown galaxy clusters, quasars, neutron star binary systems, and other significant astronomical sources both in the plane of the Milky Way — ChamPLane — and beyond the galaxy — ChaMP. ChaMP and ChaMPlane are led by astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, in collaboration with researchers at a number of other institutions in the United States and around the world.