Observatory Night lectures will take place on the third Thursday of the month from January through May. Topics will include a new view of the Sun, why we should send astronauts to the ast...

At 7:30 pm on Thursday, January 19, the Center for Astrophysics will hold our first Observatory Night talk of 2012, which will be all about the new view of our Sun provided by NASA's Sola...

A large team of scientists led by CfA astronomer Francois Fressin, and including ten other CfA astronomers, last week announced the dramatic discovery of two Earth-sized planets around an...

Cambridge, MA Astronomers using NASA's Kepler mission have detected two Earth-sized planets orbiting a distant star. This discovery marks a milestone in the hunt for alien worlds, since ...

Matter in the universe after the big bang consisted almost entirely of hydrogen and helium atoms. Only later, after undergoing fusion reactions in the nuclear furnaces of stars, did thes...

Perhaps the most astonishing and revolutionary discovery in cosmology was Edwin Hubble's observation that galaxies are moving away from us with velocities that are proportional to their d...

Cambridge, MA In the distant reaches of the universe, almost 13 billion light-years from Earth, a strange species of galaxy lay hidden. Cloaked in dust and dimmed by the intervening dist...

The earliest stages in the life of a star are among the most mysterious. This is primarily because stars form inside dark clouds of material that block optical light, and because they for...

Cambridge, MA The cosmos constantly changes. Stars are born, live out their lives, and die - sometimes calmly, sometimes explosively. Galaxies form, grow, and collide dramatically. A new...

Black holes are among the most amazing and bizarre predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity. A black hole is thought to be point-like in dimension, but it is surrounded by an imaginar...