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...

Stars form when gravitational forces coalesce the gas and dust in interstellar clouds until the material forms clumps dense enough to become stars. Precisely how this happens, however, is...

Einstein's theory of relativity is remarkable not only because it is so successful in explaining seemingly bizarre observations (like the bending of starlight) or because it has assembled...

Cambridge, MA - Today, astronomers are releasing the highest-resolution images ever taken of the Sun's corona, or million-degree outer atmosphere, in an extreme-ultraviolet wavelength ...

The star TW Hydrae is located about 150 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation of Hydrae, the Water Snake. This star is relatively young, about 10 million years old,...