Featured series 
Tag: Department of Astronomy
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Campus & Community
John Peter Huchra
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on April 1, 2014, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late John Peter Huchra, Robert O. and Holly Thomis Doyle Professor of Cosmology, was placed upon the records.
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Science & Tech
Can iPads help students learn science? Yes
A new study by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shows that students grasp the unimaginable emptiness of space more effectively when they use iPads to explore 3-D simulations of the universe, compared with traditional classroom instruction.
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Science & Tech
Understanding student weaknesses
As part of an unusual study that surveyed 181 middle school physical science teachers and nearly 10,000 students, researchers found that the most successful teachers were those who knew what students would get wrong on standardized tests.
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Science & Tech
Invisible matters
A new study seeking to answer the question of why some galaxies are extremely dark compared with others may eventually help to explain the formation of all galaxies, according to researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). While the inner structure of most galaxies is dominated by their visible components, the small, spheroid-shaped galaxies…
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Science & Tech
Peculiar, junior-sized supernova discovered by New York teen
In November 2008, Caroline Moore, a 14-year-old student from upstate New York, discovered a supernova in a nearby galaxy, making her the youngest person ever to do so.
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Health
Taking a stride toward synthetic life
Harvard scientists have cleared a key hurdle in the creation of synthetic life, assembling a cell’s critical protein-making machinery in an advance with both practical, industrial applications and that advances the basic understanding of life’s workings. George Church, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School and member of Harvard’s Origins of Life Initiative, reported the…
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Science & Tech
Charbonneau gets prestigious ‘young researcher’ award
David Charbonneau, the 34-year-old Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Astronomy, has been named the recipient of the National Science Foundation’s 2009 Alan T. Waterman Award, and will receive $500,000 over a three-year period for scientific research or advanced study in his field. The annual Waterman Award recognizes an outstanding young researcher in any field…
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Science & Tech
Transit search finds super-Neptune
Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics havediscovered a planet somewhat larger and more massive than Neptuneorbiting a star 120 light-years from Earth. While Neptune has a diameter3.8 times that of Earth and a mass 17 times Earth’s, the new world(named HAT-P-11b) is 4.7 times the size of Earth and has 25 Earthmasses. HAT-P-11b was…
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Science & Tech
New visualization techniques yield star formation insights
New computer visualization technology developed by the Harvard Initiative in Innovative Computing has helped astrophysicists understand that gravity plays a larger role than previously thought in deep space’s vast, star-forming molecular clouds. The insight, to be reported in the Jan. 1 issue of the journal Nature, is being illustrated in the journal’s online version through…
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Science & Tech
Solar evidence points to human causes of climate change
It’s getting harder and harder to blame the sun for causing the gradual increase in global temperatures that are now being seen in the climate record, scientists said today. In a symposium today on the potential role of solar variability — increases in heat coming from the sun — held in Boston at the annual…
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Science & Tech
Mystery comet explodes into brightness
A once-faint comet has made a sudden leap from obscurity tocenter stage. Comet 17P Holmes, now visible to northern hemisphereresidents, increased its brightness by a factor of one million this week,going from magnitude 17 to 2. This makes it visible to the unaided eye aswell as binoculars and telescopes, offering a unique viewing opportunity forsky…
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Science & Tech
Cosmic cloudshine
Hubble’s iconic images include many shots of cosmic clouds of gas and dust called nebulae. For example, the famous “Pillars of Creation” mark the birthplace of new stars within the Eagle Nebula. Yet despite their beauty, visible-light images show only the nebulae surfaces. Baby stars may hide beneath, invisible even to Hubble’s powerful gaze. Harvard…
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Science & Tech
Ferreting out the first stars
The first stars are so distant and formed so long ago that they are invisible to our best telescopes. Until they explode. Hypernovas (more powerful cousins of supernovas) and their associated gamma-ray bursts offer astronomers the possibility of detecting light from the first generations of stars. NASA’s Swift satellite already has seen a gamma-ray burst…
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Science & Tech
High school AP courses do not predict college success in science
A survey of 18,000 college students enrolled in introductory biology, chemistry, and physics has found little evidence that high school Advanced Placement (AP) courses significantly boost college performance in the sciences. The study by researchers at Harvard University and the University of Virginia (UVA) found the best predictors of success in college science courses to…
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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
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
Lifeless suns dominated early universe
The very first generation of stars were not at all like our Sun. They were white-hot, massive stars that were very short-lived. Burning for only a few million years, they collapsed and exploded as brilliant supernovae. Those very first stars began the seeding process in the universe, spreading vital elements like carbon and oxygen, which…
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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
First Milky Ways found at edge of universe
One key question that has puzzled astronomers for decades is: When did the first stars and galaxies form after the Big Bang occurred? The answer — very quickly! Astronomers Rennan Barkana of Tel Aviv University and Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics found the first direct evidence that galaxies as large as the…
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Science & Tech
Harvard science historian publishes results of unprecedented 30-year census of Copernican masterpiece
First published in 1543, Nicholas Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium introduced the world to the concept of a sun-centered universe. In it, Copernicus detailed how the motions of the sun, moon, planets, and stars could be explained if the earth orbited the sun — a revolutionary idea. Starting in the 1970s, researcher Owen Gingerich began…
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Science & Tech
New, far-out planet is discovered
A planet discovered in the constellation Sagittarius is so distant that light takes 5,000 years to travel from there to here at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. Called OGLE-TR-56b, the planet orbits too close to its sun to be hospitable to living things. The way it was found could lead to the discovery…
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Science & Tech
Looking toward the end
Among astronomers there is almost a consensus that universal expansion will go on forever, with galaxies and clusters of galaxies moving away from each other so fast that gravity cannot ever pull them together. Since 1998, astronomers have found good evidence that this expansion is accelerating, that galaxies are separating at ever-increasing speed. But what…
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Science & Tech
Gamma rays may be left over from cosmic construction project
The origin of the diffuse and pervasive background of gamma-ray radiation that exists over the universe has been one of the great unsolved mysteries in cosmology. Even the known population of powerful extragalactic gamma-ray sources, called “blazars,” can account for no more than a quarter of the gamma-ray background radiation that is observed. According to…