The first results on the iconic active galactic nucleus MCG–6-30-15 captured with the XRISM mission show the most precise signatures yet of its supermassive black hole’s extreme gravity and the ...

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 ...

As we investigate our Universe, black holes are some of the most violent and mysterious objects we find. Black holes are collapsed objects of incredible density that exert a gravitational pull so ...

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 ...

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 Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian Solar, Stellar & Planetary Sciences (SSP) division research is directed toward understanding star and planet formation and the physical processes in ...

About 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang gave rise to everything, everywhere, and everywhen—the entire known Universe. What caused the Big Bang? What happened that first moment at the beginning of ...

Cambridge, MA-- Astronomers analyzing 3D maps of the shapes and sizes of nearby molecular clouds have discovered a gigantic cavity in space. The sphere-shaped void, described today in The ...

For the first time, astronomers have retraced the history of our galactic neighborhood, showing exactly how the young stars nearest to our solar system formed. "This is really an origin story; for the ...

For the first 380,000 years or so after the Big Bang, the entire universe was a hot soup of particles and photons, too dense for light to travel very far. However, as the cosmos expanded, it cooled ...

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 ...

Capturing the first image of a supermassive black hole using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). This image of the black hole at the center of the nearby galaxy M87 reveals how gravitation affects the ...