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A Confirmed Distance Record for a Galaxy

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About thirteen billion years ago the newborn universe began to produce stars. The first ones appeared only a few hundred million years after the big bang, but they were unlike stars of to...

Identifying Gamma Ray Blazars

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A blazar is a galaxy with an intensely bright central nucleus containing a supermassive black hole, much like a quasar. The difference is that a blazar can emit extremely high energy gamm...

The Search for Other Earths

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Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) are among those drafting the target list for NASA's next planet-finding telescope, the orbiting Transiting Exoplanet Su...

Don Quixote: An Asteroid that is a Living Comet

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Near Earth Objects (NEOs) are asteroids or comets whose orbits sometimes bring them close to the earth's orbit. An NEO could therefore someday collide with the Earth -- giving them consid...

Runaway Binary Stars

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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...

The Intergalactic Medium in the Young Universe

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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...

Galaxy Winds

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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...

Fall Public Events Schedule Now Online

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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 ...

"Red Nugget" Galaxies Were Hiding in Plain Sight

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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...
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