Center for Astrophysics l Harvard & Smithsonian

✨ The universe leans in a little closer in the desert.

These sweeping photos reveal our own Milky Way from some of the darkest skies on Earth.

The first and second images show our galactic core, with the bright region marking the center of our galaxy, nearly 26,000 light years away.

The third image shows the core underneath a full moon so bright it appears to be daytime.

The final image shows the twin 6.5-meter Magellan Telescopes seen at dusk.

The images were taken by, and feature, our postdoctoral fellow Kaley Brauer while visiting the Las Campanas Observatory, , in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Each uses a 30-second exposure to capture the night sky.

✨ The proton sharks showed up on a Friday.

A group of Parker Solar Probe scientists were scrolling their data visualizing solar winds. Suddenly, a weird shape flashed on the screen.

“This looks like a hammerhead shark,” said heliophysicist Jaye Verniero of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center..

Instead of a usual rounded blob of solar‑wind protons, this distribution had a long, flattened, head-like structure jutting out to one side. Thus, hammerheads: and the nickname stuck.

Now, CfA astronomer Srijan Bharati Das and his colleagues have figured out that these are incredibly hot, rapidly moving proton clumps that signify the edges of the sun's heliospheric current sheet: a vast surface where the Sun’s magnetic field flips.

The hammerheads can help scientists locate the current sheet, which is invisible to our eyes, and further help us understand why the sun’s outer layers remain so much hotter than science says they should be.

Read more on our CfA News page!
https://s.si.edu/4uw6etz

✨ Like a blister in the sun.

In the most detailed observation of its kind, a CfA-led solar research team watched a huge rising solar flare suddenly stall, stop, and fall back home.

The failed solar prominence was prevented from erupting fully by an unusual magnetic field pressing in on it, in addition to the one hurling it into space.

Not only is it very cool to visualize, but lead author Tingyu Gou and colleague Katharine Reeves, both astronomers at the CfA's Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), say the findings help us understand why we've observed that other stars seem to have fewer solar flares than our Sun.

Read more at our CfA News website! https://s.si.edu/4tULMBv

✨Cutting through the fog into deep deep space.

Astronomers have measured for the first time the millions of tiny, turbulent ripples that distort space between our telescopes and the objects we most want to see. In this study, they looked at the quasar TXS 2005+403, about 10 billion light-years away.

On the left, this artist’s conception shows the quasar as it truly appears, with a bright accretion disk and jets blasting. On the right, we see a clouds of ionized gas and electrons producing a turbulent haze, disrupting scientists’ view of the quasar in much the same way heat haze from a fire warps our view of the objects behind it.

The better we are at measuring this turbulence and accounting for it, says lead scientist Sasha Pravin, the better able we’ll be to measure other complex things with accuracy…like black holes.

The study used the ’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA).

Read more at our link in bio.

Credit: Melissa Weiss/CfA

✨With AI poised to revolutionize how we do science, some of our brightest scientists and engineers at the Smithsonian came together to discuss how we can make it work for us - if we do it with integrity.

Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory scientist Cecilia Garraffo, director of the AstroAI Institute at CfA, spoke at a special AI expo in DC this week. Smithsonian Under Secretary of Science and Research Ellen Stofan (far right) moderated a panel with (from left to right) Becky Kobberod, Smithsonian Chief Digital and Innovation Officer; Carlos Jaramillo, Smithsonian Tropical Research Center Staff Scientist; Garraffo; and Rebecca Johnson, National Museum of Natural History C.W. Whitney Chief Scientist.

✨ Members of the Chandra X-ray Observatory recently participated in the 2026 Space Fest at the JFK Library Foundation Dorchester, MA.

The Chandra team guided children and adults through black hole demos and binary code, running immersive VR and sonification experiences, and discussing Chandra 3D models and micro/macro scales.

Shout out to Chandra's Nance Wolk and Rutu Das, who organized the event with Wendy Fernandez!

✨ That's a wrap on our April Public Observatory Night!

So much fun to explore the explosive power of supernovae and how the CfA is at the forefront of studying these phenomena.

Post-doctoral fellows Anya Nugent and Danielle Frostig spoke on “Things That Go Boom in the Night” to more than 100 people in Phillips Auditorium.

We learned about core-collapse supernovae, the massive, terminal explosions that mark the end of the lives of stars; kilonovae, the powerful, rare astronomical explosions caused when two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole merge; and how the Rubin Observatory and Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will lead to many more of these discoveries! 🔭

Outreach Manager Philippe Reekie then led tours of our historic Great Refractor Telescope. Telling people about the spectacular science done by our astronomers and the rich cultural history of the CfA...it never gets old. 🏛️ 💥

✨ Join us on our next adventure: Cosmos For All, our new podcast where the brightest stars in astronomy take on the biggest questions in the universe!

In this monthly show we'll learn about popular astronomy with some of the CfA's leading experts, while hearing about their personal journeys to study the stars.

And who better to kick off our podcast than the legendary astrophysicist, Jonathan McDowell?

McDowell joins hosts Philippe Reekie and Christine Buckley to reflect on his 50-year career, including black holes, quasars, the role of dark matter in the universe and the three decades he spent on the CfA-operated X-ray Observatory.

He fondly talks about his "side quest" to document space debris, and we end with the big questions: What makes astronomy so fascinating? Why do we do it? When will we find the first real evidence of alien life?

Find Cosmos for All wherever you get your podcasts!

Produced by the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, comprising the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory.

Hosts: Christine Buckley, Philippe Reekie
Audio engineering: Aidan Lilienfeld
Production: Aidan Lilienfeld, Christine Buckley

✨ Drink deep and look up…it’s Astronomy On Tap!

So excited to be part of this great and growing tradition. Our own CfA graduate students Sam McCarty, Qijia Zhou, and Tintin Nguyen organized the recent Astronomy on Tap Boston event at on January 19, bringing radio astronomy to a standing-room-only public audience.

Sam McCarty kicked things off with a brief history of the field — from Karl Jansky’s first detection of radio signals and Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s discovery of pulsars, to today’s frontiers of fast radio bursts and interferometry.

Then our masterful black hole astrophysicist Michael Johnson took the audience on a trip to where spacetime twists and glows, with highlights from the CfA-led Event Horizon Telescope and a look ahead to the proposed space-based Black Hole Explorer mission.

CfA graduate student Anna Fehr then shared her quest to understand how planets form, using protoplanetary disk observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

The enthusiastic crowd asked tons of questions and the event wrapped up with radio astronomy-themed trivia. See if you can answer the question posed here!

Thanks so much to the organizers, the brewery and all our attendees for a fantastic night!

📸 Tintin Nguyen