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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Line Emission Mapper (LEM) is an X-ray Probe Mission concept to study galaxy evolution, directly addressing Astro2020 Decadal's Priority Area of Unveiling the Drivers of Galaxy Growth. LEM is ...

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, ...

Measuring the mass of a distant exoplanet requires tracking the changes in light of the host star as the planet’s gravity tugs it slightly — a delicate process. The High Accuracy Radial velocity ...

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 ...