Scientists, including Scott Wolk from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, may have witnessed the destruction of a young planet or planets for the first time using data from N...

Disc galaxies like our own Milky Way, characterized by a flattened disc of stars and gas (often with a central bulge of material as well) have a wide range of masses, spatial extents, and...

The path of light from a star as it passes by a massive body, like an exoplanet, will be bent and an observer looking towards the star will see its image distorted. Like an object seen t...

Cambridge, MA - The VERITAS array has confirmed the detection of gamma rays from the vicinity of a supermassive black hole. While these detections are relatively common for VERITAS, t...

Galaxy-galaxy interactions have long been known to influence galaxy evolution. They are commonplace events, and a large majority of galaxies show signs of interactions, including tidal t...

On this Independence Day a century and a half ago, Henrietta Swan Leavitt was born. While working at Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Mass. – now part of the Harvard-Smithsonian ...

Cambridge, MA - A new study provides new clues indicating that an exoplanet 500 light-years away is much like Earth.Kepler-186f is the first identified Earth-sized planet outside the S...

A binary star system is one that contains a pair of stars orbiting each other. A black hole X-ray binary is a binary system in which one of the stars is a black hole and the other is a n...

A hallmark of great research and educational institutions is their drive for introspection and self-improvement. In keeping with this, the Smithsonian Institution recently began a five-ye...

Astronomical masers (the radio wavelength analogs of lasers) were first identified in space over fifty years ago and have since been seen in many locations; astronomical lasers have since...