Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian

These Spacey Treats Include a Galactic Smiley Face and an Interstellar Rose

A lucky lens and a pair of mismatched star twins feature among our picks for the week's best space images

Ask Smithsonian: How Does a Satellite Stay Up?

Meet a Harvard-Smithsonian researcher who monitors all the satellites and explains why they rarely fall

In the garden, Levisticum is a tall plant with dark leaves and greenish-yellow flowers. Under a microscope, however, it can morph into a cellular rainbow. This image was made using polarized light to enhance contrast. Waves in polarized light share an orientation, and special filters can block out any unpolarized waves and make the fine details easier to see.

New Exhibit Showcases the Power of Light in Our Everyday Lives

The open-source show "LIGHT: Beyond the Bulb" crosses disciplines to show the many ways photonics has improved our lives

This artist's depiction shows a gas giant planet akin to Jupiter rising over an alien ocean.

New Super-Earths Double the Number of Life-Friendly Worlds

Three studies looking at small, rocky planets are helping astronomers figure out how common worlds like ours are in the galaxy

A combination of infrared and X-ray observations indicates that a surplus of massive stars has formed from a large disk of gas around Sagittarius A*.

Inside Black Holes

Three recent black hole events and how they shape our universe

Supernova remnant Puppis A.

The Big “Gravitational Wave” Finding May Have Actually Just Been Some Dust

A supernova remnant interacting with interstellar dust could have caused the signals interpreted to be gravitational waves

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The Science of Monday’s Big “Gravitational Wave” Thing Explained in Two Minutes

Big Bang news left you lost? This Minute Physics video might help

A pigeon trap, on view at the Air and Space Museum, used by Nobel Prize winners Penzias and Wilson to remove the birds roosting in the radio antenna's large horn.

How Two Pigeons Helped Scientists Confirm the Big Bang Theory

For decades, astronomers had debated how the universe began. Then, in 1964, they had their "Eureka!" moment

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