The element carbon is a building block for life, both on Earth and potentially elsewhere in the vast reaches of space. There should be a lot of carbon in space, but surprisingly, it's not always easy ...

For nearly six months, during the year 1181, people looked up to the skies to find a new star glittering in the constellation Cassiopeia. Chinese and Japanese astronomers recorded the rare event, an ...

How can we expand the limits of human knowledge further into the unknown? The Center for Astrophysics is a collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Harvard College ...

Supernovas are some of the brightest events in the universe, occasionally outshining entire galaxies at their peak. Many supernovas can be seen from billions of light-years away, and nearby supernovas ...

Humans have studied the stars for thousands of years. To many cultures, stars were the metaphor for constancy, while everything else moved and changed. Modern stellar astronomy showed that stars do ...

Stars are the source of almost all of the light our eyes see in the sky. Nuclear fusion is what makes a star what it is: the creation of new atomic nuclei within the star’s core. Many of stars’ ...

Approximate percentage of known exoplanets that might have liquid water on their surface Scientists and engineers from the Center for Astrophysics aim to achieve the following advances to enable the ...

JADES will use guaranteed time in James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) cycle 1 to produce infrared imaging and spectroscopy of unprecedented depth in the two premier extragalactic deep fields, ...

Everything you’ve ever seen or experienced on Earth was once a nebulous collection of floating gas and dust. Science is starting to understand how those particles came to take the forms you recognize ...

From its establishment in 1966 as the Smithsonian Mount Hopkins Observatory, FLWO has hosted a world-class suite of telescopes designed for a wide variety of purposes. The largest visible-light ...

In the early morning hours of November 27, catch a rare lunar occultation of Spica visible from parts of the U.S. and Canada. When to look for Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars this month, a NASA spacecraft ...

The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian Optical and Infrared Astronomy (OIR) division has two major charges. One is to operate and develop telescopes and associated instruments and the ...