Cambridge, MA A galaxy's core is a busy place, crowded with stars swarming around an enormous black hole. When galaxies collide, it gets even messier as the two black holes spiral toward...

Galaxies often occur in groups. Our own Milky Way galaxy, for example, and its local neighborhood with about fifty galaxies are at the edge of the Virgo Cluster, a collection of somewher...

Cambridge, MA White dwarfs are dead stars that pack a Sun's-worth of matter into an Earth-sized ball. Astronomers have just discovered an amazing pair of white dwarfs whirling around eac...

Cambridge, MA The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has been selected by the National Science Foundation as recipient of a 12-meter (39-foot) radio antenna designed for s...

Sunspots have been observed for about four centuries, since they were first reported by Galileo. Appearing in roughly eleven-year cycles of activity, sunspots are regions of strong and c...

The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory is a far-flung enterprise. Having grown beyond the capacity of its original location on the National Mall, in 1955 the Observatory moved its hea...

Magnetic fields play an important role in theformation and evolution of stars, as they stretch around a hot medium like a rubber band and help to determine the flow of material onto or aw...

There is a new candidate for coldest known star: a brown dwarf with about the same temperature as a hot cup of coffee. That’s cool enough to begin crossing the blurry line between small c...

Galaxies are sometimes found in large clusters with many hundreds of members. Typically there is a giant elliptical galaxy near the center; most of these ellipticals are very bright emi...

Over 170 molecules have been detected in space, from simple diatomic molecules like CO to complex organic molecules with over 70 atoms, like fullerene. These molecules play a critical rol...