Scientists study the atmospheres of many worlds with orbiting spacecraft, but Earth is the only planet where we can measure the effects of life — and of the negative impacts of civilization. When it ...

Cambridge, MA - The missing ingredient for cooking up stars has been spotted for the first time by astronomers. Much like a pressure cooker has a weight on top of its lid to keep the pressure in, ...

Large galaxies like the Milky Way formed out of mergers with smaller galaxies and by stealing some of their stars. Astronomers discovered that as many as 25% of galaxies are currently merging with ...

The Milky Way alone probably contains hundreds of billions of planets, based on the thousands of exoplanets we’ve already identified. These planets share a history and origin with their host stars, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

National Harbor, MD - Astronomers have unveiled an explosive cosmic fireworks display of stars interacting with their environment. This dazzling spectacle – due to powerful winds flowing from the ...

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 ...

Finding and describing new exoplanets using TESS and other observatories. TESS is designed to observe stars closer to the Solar System than those studied by other observatories, providing targets for ...