Become an astronomer for a day! Enjoy telescope tours, interactive multimedia exhibits, hands-on activities, live demonstrations, and our ever-popular Scientist Cafe, where visitors can c...

Multiple stars - binaries, triplets, or perhaps more stars, that orbit each other - are unique laboratories into the interactions between stars and their early environments. Young stars ...

Astronomers love Tucson and Tucson loves astronomers. The city is ringed by craggy mountain peaks topped by observatories, including Kitts Peak, Mt. Hopkins, and Mt. Graham. Astronomers s...

Cambridge, MA One trillion years from now, an alien astronomer in our galaxy will have a difficult time figuring out how the universe began. They won't have the evidence that we enjoy to...

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...