Cambridge, MA - Nearly four billion years ago, life arose on Earth. Life appeared because our planet had a rocky surface, liquid water, and a blanketing atmosphere. But life thrived th...

Globular clusters are gravitationally bound, roughly spherical ensembles of stars. Some contain as many as a million stars, and their sizes are as small as only tens of light-years in dia...

Cosmic dust is not simply something to sweep under the rug and forget about.Instead, National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded astronomers are studying and even mapping it to learn more ab...

The CfA Optical/Infrared Telescope Data Center is pleased to announce a new public archive of processed spectra obtained from CfA's ground-based telescopes. The initial release contains ...

The epoch when the very first stars appeared in the universe is unknown but is of tremendous interest. These stars began the manufacturing of the chemical elements (heavier than hydrogen...

The center of our Milky Way galaxy lies about 27,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius. At its core is a black hole about four million solar masses in ...

Cambridge, MA - On September 14, 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detected gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes 29 and 36 times th...

A lensing cluster is a gravitationally bound collection of galaxies, hundreds or even thousands, whose mass acts as a gravitational lens to collect and reimage the light of more distant o...

Cambridge, MA -

The first stars appeared about one hundred million years after the big bang, and ever since then stars and star formation processes have lit up the cosmos, producing heavy elements, plane...