HD1, object in red, appears at the center of a zoom-in image. Credit: Harikane et al. Shining only ~300 million years after the Big BangThe…
Posts published in “Harvard-Smithsonian Center For Astrophysics”
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Artist’s conception of Planet Nine. Credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC) The Solar System has eight planets. In 2006, astronomers reclassified PlutoPluto is a dwarf planet in…
Giant Magellan Telescope. Credit: GMTO Corporation The U.S. Extremely Large Telescope Program, which includes the Giant Magellan Telescope, was ranked mission critical by the 2020…

In 1999 Mysterious Finger-Like Features Were Spotted on the Sun – Now Scientists Have an Explanation
Still image of several supra-arcade downflows, also described as “dark, finger-like features,” occurring in a solar flare. The downflows appear directly above the bright flare…
Artist’s illustration of the Local Bubble with star formation occurring on the bubble’s surface. Scientists have now shown how a chain of events beginning 14…
An infrared image of an infrared dark cloud (IRDC) taken by the IRAC camera on the Spitzer Space Telescope. The dark filament of material is…
Artist’s conception of the Milky Way galaxy. Credit: Pablo Carlos Budassi One of the characteristic features of modern cosmology is its description of how galaxies…
An artist’s impression of a star’s dusty debris disk, thought to be produced when asteroids or other planetesimals collide and fragment. Astronomers studying the debris…
Artist’s concept of a dark and mysterious object. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESSLaunched on April 18, 2018, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, NASA’s…
An image of a galaxy seen face-on in a simulation. It shows the distribution of gas over the galaxy (red is higher density and blue…
RBS 797 is a galaxy cluster located about 3.9 billion light years from Earth. Four enormous cavities, or bubbles, have been found at the center…
Credit: M.Weiss/Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian Researchers have predicted the new class of star’s existence for 50 years but until now, never observed…
To understand how the universe formed, astronomers have created AbacusSummit, more than 160 simulations of how gravity may have shaped the distribution of dark matter.…
This artist’s concept shows the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, spacecraft, in its orbit around Earth. Launched in 2009, it isn’t new, but its…
An artist’s conception of the seven planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system which orbit the star in an exceptinally flat plane. Astronomers have used the extreme…
Credit: DESY, Science Communication Lab New calculations show that a black holeA black hole is a place in space where the pull of gravity is…
Astronomers have found evidence for a possible planet candidate in the M51 (“Whirlpool”) galaxy, representing what could be the first planet detected outside of the…
The BICEP3 telescope located at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. (The metal skirt around the telescope shields it from reflected light from the…
This deep Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the diffuse dwarf galaxy NGC2052-DF2, an unusual “see-through” galaxy. The giant cosmic cotton ball is so diffuse and…
An image from the ROMULUS computer simulation showing an intermediate mass galaxy, its bright central region with its supermassive black hole, and the locations (and…