It started with an offhand remark, an unusual characterization for astronomers talking about stars: "They’re going off like popcorn." The comment referred to the fact that stars are explo...

Astronomers have detected about 180 molecules in interstellar space, from simple ones like carbon monoxide (one atom of carbon and one of oxygen) to complex species like buckminsterfuller...

Cambridge, MA Nature hath no fury like a dying star – and astronomers couldn’t be happier…

Cambridge, MA Gravitational waves, much like the recently discovered Higgs boson, are notoriously difficult to observe. Scientists first detected these ripples in the fabric of space-tim...

Most galaxies lie in clusters, groupings of several to many thousands of galaxies. Our Milky Way galaxy itself is a member of the "Local Group," a band of about fifty galaxies whose othe...

(Written by Christine Pulliam, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, for Smithsonian Science, a website featuring highlights of scientific research at the Smithsonian Institution.) Have ...

Cambridge, MA Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and their colleagues at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) have invented a new comp...

Cambridge, MA Astronomers have found an extraordinary galaxy cluster, one of the largest objects in the universe, that is breaking several important cosmic records. Observations of the P...

The cosmic infrared background is the collective infrared radiation emitted by cosmic sources throughout the history of the universe, including sources inaccessible to current telescopes....

Cambridge, MA The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) has released the largest three-dimensional map of massive galaxies and distant black holes ever created. The new map pinpoints t...