Cambridge, MA - Professor Charles Alcock, Director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, announces that after an extensive search, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observa...

Correction: This press release claimed that the B-mode signal detected by BICEP2 offered direct evidence of gravitational waves from cosmic inflation (BICEP2 collaboration et al. 2014). S...

The bright X-ray source known as LMC X-3 resides in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the dwarf galaxy that is the Milky Way’s nearest neighbor. Two decades ago astronomers discovered that the...

When Warner Brothers animators wanted to include cutting-edge astronomy in a 1952 Bugs Bunny cartoon they set a scene at an observatory that looks like Palomar Observatory in California. ...

Nearly thirty years ago the Infrared Astronomy Satellite discovered that the universe contained many tremendously luminous galaxies, some more than a thousand times brighter than our own ...

X-rays of a specific wavelength emanating from the hearts of nearby galaxies and galaxy clusters could be signs of particles of dark matter decaying in space, two independent teams of ast...

Gamma-rays are the most energetic known form of electromagnetic radiation, with each gamma ray being at least one hundred thousand times more energetic than an optical light photon. The m...

Cambridge, MA - New images from the Smithsonian's Submillimeter Array (SMA) telescope provide the most detailed view yet of stellar nurseries within the Snake nebula. These images offe...

Astronomer Robert Wilson lifted his fingers to make air quotes around "problem." The Nobel laureate's problem occurred 50 years ago and would help explain the origins of the universe. In ...

Our Milky Way galaxy, like most galaxies, has a nucleus with a massive black hole. Our nuclear black hole contains about four million solar masses of material, but others are thought to h...