In 2010, what great mysteries now confront astronomy? What do the next generation of observatories look like? Dr. Charles Alcock, Director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysi...

Almost 400,000 years after the universe was created in the big bang, matter cooled sufficiently for neutral atoms to form, thereby allowing the pervasive light to propagate almost complet...

Distant galaxies are not only far away in space. Because it takes time for their light to reach us, they are also very far away in time -- snapshots from the distant past. The most dista...

Cambridge, MA Since Galileo first pointed a telescope at the sky 400 years ago, a myriad of technological advances have allowed astronomers to look at very faint objects, very distant ob...

The "From Earth to the Universe" (FETTU) project -- a worldwide series of exhibitions featuring striking astronomical imagery -- has won the first Mani Bhaumik prize for excellence in ast...

Quasars are galaxies whose very bright cores are thought to contain massive black holes around which disks are actively accreting matter. The accretion process releases vast amounts of en...

Cambridge, MA Astronomers have combined a natural gravitational lens and a sophisticated telescope array to get the sharpest view ever of "star factories" in a galaxy over 10 billion lig...

According to current astronomical models, the Milky Way and other large galaxies formed over billions of years in a process that involved interactions between smaller galaxies, and in par...

The Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) is a NASA mission that arrived at Mars in September, 1997, and for nine years circled the planet every two hours in a polar orbit (that is, traveling from t...

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