Featured series 
Tag: Astrophysics
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Campus & Community
Light detected from alien planets
Light from two worlds far from our solar system has been detected for the first time. The planets that emit it are too hot to be inhabited, at least by intelligent beings, but an Earthly satellite has gotten the best views yet of planets orbiting other stars like the sun. “It’s an awesome experience to…
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Science & Tech
Astronomers measure slowest motion across the sky
“A snail crawling on Mars would appear to be moving across the surface more than 100 times faster than the motion we measured for this galaxy,” said Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a co-author on the paper. Reid and his colleagues used the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) to…
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Science & Tech
Most Milky Way stars are single
Common wisdom among astronomers holds that most star systems in the Milky Way are multiple, consisting of two or more stars in orbit around each other. Common wisdom is wrong.
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Science & Tech
Growing supermassive black holes from seeds
Astronomers announced Jan. 12, 2006 that they have found the first sample of intermediate-mass black holes in active galaxies – a discovery that will help in understanding the early universe. “These are local analogues of the `seed’ black holes from which supermassive black holes formed,” said Jenny E. Greene of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics…
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Science & Tech
New maser measurements trace detail in active galactic core
The roiling cores of many active galaxies are difficult to see in detail because of surrounding gas and interstellar dust. Smithsonian astronomers announced Jan. 12, 2006, however, a first-time measurement that may help to better trace the structure of these unusual regions. Elizabeth M. L. Humphreys and other Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) research team…
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Science & Tech
Astronomers spot the Great Orion Nebula’s successor
Astronomers announced Jan. 11, 2006, that they have found the next Orion Nebula. Known as W3, this glowing gas cloud in the constellation Cassiopeia has just begun to shine with newborn stars. Shrouds of dust currently hide its light, but this is only a temporary state. In 100,000 years – a blink of the eye…
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Science & Tech
See-through galaxy
To peer into the galactic center of our own Milky Way galaxy, astronomers Silas Laycock and Josh Grindlay used the unique capabilities of the 6.5-meter-diameter Magellan Telescope in Chile. By gathering infrared light that more easily penetrates dust, the astronomers were able to detect thousands of stars that otherwise would have remained hidden. Their goal…
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Science & Tech
Going beyond Einstein
Observations by two astronomers confirm one important theory about how a black hole’s extreme gravity can stretch light. The data also paint an intriguing image of how a spinning black hole can drag the very fabric of space around with it, creating a choppy spacetime sea that distorts everything falling into the black hole. Jon…
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Science & Tech
Scientists find black hole’s ‘point of no return’
By a score of 135 to zero, scientists using NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer have compared suspected neutron stars and black holes and found that the black holes behaved as if each one has an event horizon, the theoretical border from beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape. The team found that X-ray light…
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Science & Tech
Spitzer puts a new spin on the Helix Nebula
Helix Nebula (NGC 7293) is a challenging stargazing target for amateur astronomers. It is one of the closest planetary nebulas – a type of nebula formed from gas ejected by a dying sunlike star. Yet it is so large and spread out in the sky that it appears very dim in a telescope eyepiece. Long-exposure…
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Science & Tech
Alien treasures in our backyard
Astronomers have gained an important clue to guide their hunt for extrasolar worlds. And that clue points to the unlikeliest of places — our own backyard. “It’s possible that some of the objects in our solar system actually formed around another star,” says astronomer Scott Kenyon (Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory). How did these adopted worlds join…
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Science & Tech
Taking a CAT scan of the early universe
Reporting in the Nov. 11, 2004, issue of Nature, astrophysicists J. Stuart B. Wyithe (University of Melbourne) and Abraham Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) have calculated the size of cosmic structures that will be measured when astronomers effectively take CAT scan-like images of the early universe. Those measurements will show how the universe evolved over…
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Science & Tech
Frequent starbursts sterilize center of Milky Way
A scenario in which exploding stars kill all life within the center of our galaxy is detailed by stronomer Antony Stark (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and colleagues in the October 10, 2004, issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The team’s discovery was made possible using the unique capabilities of the Antarctic Submillimeter Telescope and Remote…
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Science & Tech
Galactic collision reveals fate of Milky Way galaxy
Sixty-eight million light-years away, the Antennae galaxies are locked in a dance of death, with stars being ripped from their orbits and spiral arms being shredded into streamers that dangle in space. Several billion years from now, our home — the Milky Way galaxy — might look the same as the Andromeda galaxy smashes into…
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Science & Tech
Tiny “David” telescope finds “Goliath” planet
A newfound planet detected by a small, 4-inch-diameter telescope demonstrates that we are at the cusp of a new age of planet discovery. Soon, new worlds may be located at an accelerating pace, bringing the detection of the first Earth-sized world one step closer. “This discovery demonstrates that even humble telescopes can make huge contributions…
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Science & Tech
Some globular clusters may be leftovers from snacking galaxies
According to the hierarchical theory of galaxy formation, galaxies have grown larger over time by consuming smaller dwarf galaxies and star clusters. And sometimes, it seems that the unfortunate prey is not swallowed whole but instead is munched like a peach, stripped of its outer layers to leave behind only the pit. New findings by…
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Science & Tech
Young star caught speeding
Findings linking a speeding star to its birthplace provide direct observational support of theoretical simulations predicting that protostars can be tossed out of a young cluster. This is the first time that such a fast-moving young star has been seen outside of a cluster or binary system. Astronomers Alyssa Goodman (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and…
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Campus & Community
Picturing a universe that’s out of sight
Giovanni Fazio, a senior physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, directed the design and construction of a camera that is looking beyond the visible universe to see planets, stars, and galaxies being born. On Aug. 25, 2003, he waited for the ignition of a Delta rocket, with extra boosters strapped to it, to blast…
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Campus & Community
Speedy solar storm reaches Earth
An Oct. 28, 2003 eruption created a monstrous solar flare – the third largest recorded since 1976 – and an associated coronal mass ejection, in which superheated gas, called plasma, streaks away from the sun at millions of miles an hour. When the plasma hits the Earth it can disrupt the planet’s magnetic field, triggering…
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Science & Tech
First supernovae quickly seeded universe with stuff of life
The early universe was a barren wasteland of hydrogen, helium, and a touch of lithium, containing none of the elements necessary for life as we know it. From those primordial gases were born giant stars 200 times as massive as the Sun, burning their fuel at such a prodigious rate that they lived for only…
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Campus & Community
Students fly in NASA’s weightless environment
Harvard Extension School students Mario Garcia, So-One Hwang, Lily Kang, and Manoj Ramachandran in July 2003 experienced the weightlessness of microgravity through NASA’s Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program, which provides research opportunities for college students aboard its Boeing KC-135A aircraft based in Houston. The Harvard team proposed to research the effectiveness of a one-person…
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Science & Tech
“Winking star” started winking only recently
In 2002, astronomers at Wesleyan University announced that they had discovered a “winking” star that undergoes a regular, long-lasting (approximately 20 day) eclipse every 48 days. They theorized that those eclipses were caused by intervening blobs of material within a protoplanetary disk surrounding that young star. Harvard astronomer Joshua Winn and colleagues decided to examine…
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Science & Tech
Asteroid Juno has a bite out of it
Juno, the third asteroid ever discovered, was first spotted by astronomers early in the 19th century. It orbits the Sun with thousands of other bits of space rock in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. One of the largest asteroids, at a size of 150 miles across, Juno essentially is a leftover building…
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Science & Tech
A pancake, not a doughnut, shapes distant galactic center
Astronomer Lincoln Greenhill (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and colleagues have found direct evidence for a “pancake” of gas and dust at the center of Circinus — a thin, warped disk surrounding the galaxy’s central, supermassive black hole. That disk shapes the galaxy’s nucleus. It shadows different regions from the “glare” of the black hole, a…
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Science & Tech
State-of-the-art solar model tracks eruption
The Sun may appear to be a bright, steadily shining orb, but it is actually a seething cauldron of hot gases prone to violent eruptions. The most dramatic eruptions are coronal mass ejections (CMEs), in which giant, bubble-shaped balloons of plasma and magnetic field lines blast outward at speeds of up to 1,500 miles per…
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Science & Tech
Harvard continues legacy of Cepheid discoveries
Cepheids are important to astronomers for their key role as extragalactic distance indicators. Cepheids are variable stars that regularly brighten and dim as they pulsate rhythmically. Their pulsation period is proportional to their intrinsic brightness – the longer the period, the brighter the star. A comparison of intrinsic to apparent brightness yields the distance to…
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Science & Tech
Do we live in a “stop and go” universe?
At the 202nd meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Robert Kirshner (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), on behalf of the international High-z Supernova Search Team led by Brian Schmidt (Mount Stromlo Observatory), presented evidence that the expanding universe slowed for billions of years before galaxies began accelerating, like cars that get past a bottleneck. “Right now,…
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Science & Tech
Global warming is not so hot
Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics took a look at how weather has changed in the past 1,000 years. They looked at studies of changes in glaciers, corals, stalagmites, and fossils. They checked investigations of cores drilled out of ice caps and sediments lying on the bottom of lakes, rivers, and seas. They examined…
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Science & Tech
Astronomers link gamma-ray bursts, supernovae
Gamma-ray bursts are incredibly bright flashes of high-energy radiation that likely signal the birth of black holes. Bursts occur at random locations scattered across the sky, and few last more than a minute, making them a challenge to study. A supernova is the explosion of a star at least eight times as massive as the…
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Science & Tech
Cool X-ray disk points to new type of black hole
Black holes are objects so dense and with a gravitational potential so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape the pull if it ventures too close. Black holes are invisible, yet the gas and dust falling into a black hole are heated to high temperatures and glow furiously. Scientists agree that there are at…