CfA astronomers made a remarkable and fortuitous discovery in 2005: an extremely fast moving star, clocked going over three million kilometers an hour. It appears to have been ejected fr...

In its earliest years, the universe was so hot that electrons and protons could not bind together in neutral atoms: all of the gas in the cosmos was ionized. Then, after 380,000 years o...

As e-readers grow in popularity as convenient alternatives to traditional books, researchers at the Smithsonian have found that convenience may not be their only benefit. The team discove...

The most luminous galaxies in our universe are not particularly bright in the visible. Most of their energy output (which can be hundreds or even thousands of times more than our Milky W...

Observatory Night lectures will take place on the third Thursday of the month from September through December. These public talks feature a variety of astronomical topics that are timely ...

Cambridge, MA In 2005 the Hubble Space Telescope spotted unusually small galaxies densely packed with red stars in the distant, young universe. They were nicknamed "red nuggets," not onl...

Our nearest neighbor star, Proxima Centauri, is about 4.2 light-years away. This distance is typical (on average) between stars (or gravitationally bound stellar systems) in the Milky Wa...

"We don't send anyone through here without a personal guide," joked Matt Holman as he led a visitor through a maze of corridors and crossways at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astroph...

Cambridge, MA Astronomers are constantly on the hunt for ever-colder star-like bodies, and two years ago a new class of objects was discovered by researchers using NASA's WISE space tele...

In our solar system, dust particles are abundant, created by asteroid collisions andby the evaporation of comets. These particles are the source of the zodiacal light, a diffuse glow in t...