Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. How can we expand the limits of human knowledge further into the unknown? The Center for Astrophysics is a collaboration between the Smithsonian ...

Cambridge, MA— A new landmark study has pinpointed the location of the Universe's "missing" matter, and detected the most distant fast radio burst (FRB) on record. Using FRBs as a guide, astronomers ...

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 universe began 13.8 billion years ago, and in its early years, it looked completely different than it does now. For nearly 400,000 years, the entire cosmos was opaque, which means we have no ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Our modern understanding of gravity comes from Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which stands as one of the best-tested theories in science. General relativity predicted many phenomena ...

All the atoms and light in the universe together make up less than five percent of the total contents of the cosmos. The rest is composed of dark matter and dark energy, which are invisible but ...

Most of the atoms in the universe are either hydrogen or helium, formed within the first few minutes after the Big Bang. The other elements are mostly made by nuclear fusion in stars, especially ...

The Milky Way is our galactic home, part of the story of how we came to be. Astronomers have learned that it’s a large spiral galaxy, similar to many others, but also different in ways that reflect ...

Matter and energy are the two basic components of the entire Universe. An enormous challenge for scientists is that most of the matter in the Universe is invisible and the source of most of the energy ...