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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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’ ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

The CfA, comprised of education researchers, scientists, teachers, media specialists and graduate students, is a national leader in science education. Major projects include the development of ...