It was a milestone moment. In 2019, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) received the largest private philanthropic gift in its history: $10 million. The gift funds SAO scient...

On Friday, Dec. 10, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) Advisory Board presented Charles Alcock with a surprise endowment established in his honor.

Cambridge, MA -- A spacecraft launched by NASA has done what was once thought impossible. On April 28, the Parker Solar Probe successfully entered the corona of the Sun — an extreme envir...

Supermassive black holes (SMBH) at the centers of galaxies sometimes accrete material onto a surrounding torus of gas and dust. When this happens, the material is heated to thousands of d...

Debris disks around main-sequence stars are tenuous belts of dust thought to be produced when asteroids or other planetesimals collide and fragment. They are common: more than about a qua...

Cambridge, MA -- Researchers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have observed a new type of binary star that has long been theorized to exist. The discovery finall...

Molecular clouds in the Milky Way are generally very inefficient in forming stars; only about 1% of the available material ends up in a star. Astronomers think one reason is that star-for...

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are bright pulses of emission at radio wavelengths (seen mostly at wavelengths of tens of centimeters) whose physical mechanism(s) are mysterious. The bursts last...

Galaxy clusters are the largest and most recently formed structures in the universe. The closest large cluster of galaxies to us is the Virgo Cluster with about 2000 members. (The Milky W...

Pasadena, CA -- The 2020 Decadal Survey for Astronomy and Astrophysics has recommended federal support for the final construction stages of the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) as part of t...