Galaxies with extremely high rates of star formation (from hundreds to thousands of solar-masses worth of stars per year) are rare. Our Milky Way, for example, makes only about one star ...

Cambridge, MA - A black hole four million times as massive as our Sun lurks at the center of the Milky Way. This black hole, called Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), swallows nearby material th...

The universe is about 13.8 billion years old, and its stars are arguably its most momentous handiwork. Astronomers studying the intricacies of star formation across cosmic time are tryin...

Amado, AZ & Cambridge, MA - Expected to see first light in early 2019, a prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope (pSCT) for gamma-ray astronomy will be unveiled in a special inaug...

Cambridge, MA - New research that included astronomers Luca Matra and David J. Wilner of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian has found the first confirmed example ...

Cambridge, MA - Astronomers have discovered behavior by a jet from a giant black hole that has never been seen before. Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory they have observed a jet t...

Exoplanet surveys have yielded many surprises over the years, and the discovery of "disintegrating" exoplanets was one of them. These are planets that produce asymmetric shapes in the di...

Most galaxies host supermassive black holes at their nuclei, each with millions or billions of solar-masses of material. There is thought to be a torus of dust and gas around the black ...

The existence of black holes is well established, and observations have found both stellar mass sized objects and giant ones millions to billions times more massive than the sun at the ce...

The remarkable exoplanet discoveries made by the Kepler and K2 missions have enabled astronomers to begin to piece together the history of the Earth and to understand how and why it diffe...