Looking for hidden structures and unusual stars that reveal the Milky Way’s history. Since our galaxy grew by merging with and eating other galaxies, traces of that violent past are visible in the ...

Most of the atoms in the universe are either hydrogen or helium, formed within the first few minutes after the Big Bang. The other elements are mostly made by nuclear fusion in stars, especially ...

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 ...

Black holes are some of the most fascinating and mind-bending objects in the cosmos. The very thing that characterizes a black hole also makes it hard to study: its intense gravity. All the mass in a ...

The observable universe is home to more than a hundred billion galaxies of many shapes and sizes. The most distant galaxies are relics of an earlier era, so observing them is a glimpse at history.

The Milky Way is our galactic home, part of the story of how we came to be. Astronomers have learned that it’s a large spiral galaxy, similar to many others, but also different in ways that reflect ...

The Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (FLWO), part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, is a major observatory based in Mount Hopkins, Arizona. Alongside its status as an active ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian follows the Smithsonian Institution's Open Access (CC0) policy. Our digital assets are in the public domain and are thus free of copyright ...

Modern astronomy requires the best telescopes, detectors, spacecraft, and other equipment. The scientists, engineers, and staff of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian participate in ...