Dr. Christine Jones, Director of the Consortium for Unlocking the Mysteries of the Universe and Senior Astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, will receive the 2013 S...

Black holes with masses of millions or even billions of suns appear to reside at the nuclei of galaxies. In dramatic cases like quasars they are thought to be responsible for the spectac...

Harvard graduate student in astronomy Sarah Rugheimer has been selected as one of eight Harvard Horizon Scholars for 2014. Rugheimer is a participant in Harvard’s Origins of Life Initiati...

A maser, like a laser, is a source of bright electromagnetic radiation, with the difference being that maser radiation is not optical light but rather longer wavelength, microwave radiati...

Astrophysicist Margaret J. Geller of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) will receive this year's Karl Schwarzschild Medal of the German Astronomical Society (Astronomis...

Star formation lights up a galaxy because many newly formed stars are massive, hot and bright. These young stars are made in dusty clouds of material that obscure their visible light, an...

Cambridge, MA - Our solar system seems like a neat and orderly place, with small, rocky worlds near the Sun and big, gaseous worlds farther out, all eight planets following orbital pat...

SAO astrophysicist and senior scientist Scott Kenyon has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). To be elected a Fellow of the APS, a member must have made "exceptio...

Luminous infrared galaxies shine with the radiative output of tens of Milky Way galaxies, or even more. Their most striking feature, however, is not their tremendous energy output but the...

In 1978, the dwarf planet Pluto was discovered to have a companion, called Charon. With a mass about 12% Pluto’s mass, Charon orbits its partner about seventeen Pluto-radii away (for com...