Along with the major planets — Earth, Jupiter, and so forth — the Solar System is home to many small bodies including asteroids, comets, Kuiper Belt objects like Pluto, and their satellites. While the ...

Stars are often gregarious things. Based on observation and theoretical models, many stars are born in clusters — groups of ten or more stars that were formed from the same interstellar cloud. The ...

Stars have a life cycle: they’re born, they pass through middle age, and they die. The birth of a star determines much of how it lives that life. For that reason, researchers study star-forming ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

The Galileo Project for the Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts ...

The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian High Energy Astrophysics division focuses on X-ray astronomy and instrumentation involved in observations of high-energy sources. This research aims ...

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 ...

Measuring the mass of a distant exoplanet requires tracking the changes in light of the host star as the planet’s gravity tugs it slightly — a delicate process ...

Gould’s Belt is a long chain of clouds in the Milky Way comprised of stellar nurseries and hot young stars. Stretching across a substantial part of the night sky, Gould’s Belt includes the Orion ...