On the evening of December 12, 1921, as 53-year old astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt succumbed to cancer, heavy rains fell from the skies over Cambridge, Massachusetts. After nearly 30 y...

Infrared dark clouds (IRDCs) are dark patches of cold dust and gas seen in the sky against the bright diffuse infrared glow of warm dust in our galaxy. IRDCs are massive, cold, and rich i...

The most luminous galaxies in the universe are more than a thousand times brighter than our Milky Way, but they are relatively dim in the optical. Most of their radiation is emitted at in...

NASA is set for another Apollo moment with the launch of its new James Webb Space Telescope as early as Dec. 24, barring complications. Billed as NASA's most ambitious telescope to date, ...

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...