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 ...

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 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 ...

SPT is a 10-meter telescope designed to measure tiny CMB temperature ripples in submillimeter or microwave light, between infrared and radio on the spectrum of light. Its capabilities also make it an ...

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 Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) was a space-based solar observatory which operated from 1998 through 2010. TRACE primarily observed in ultraviolet light to map the small-scale ...

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 ...

Knowing under what conditions life emerged on Earth will give us valuable insight into how and where it may have developed elsewhere in the universe. We are constantly learning how our young planet ...

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 ...

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 ...