Space & Aviation
Explore Space & Aviation across the Smithsonian through stories, events, and exhibitions. Use the filters to browse by format, then bookmark events and exhibitions to keep track of what you want to visit or attend.
522 results
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Researchers captured an unprecedented image of the stellar recycling process while calibrating a Chile-based instrument called MOTHRA, which is expected to be complete by the end of 2026.
The discovery of the Kuiper Belt revealed thousands of icy objects near Pluto, challenging its status as a planet. After the discovery of Eris, astronomers formally redefined “planet” in 2006, leading to Pluto’s reclassification as a dwarf planet.
Galaxies are like cosmic gems, each with characteristics including size and shape that make them distinct.
Museum education manager Mike Hulslander goes above and beyond his ~duties~ to show us a reproduction of the Universal Waste Management System. It’s currently in use on the International Space Station and NASA’s Orion spacecraft.
If you haven’t been to the National Air and Space Museum in D.C. for a while, you may notice a few things have changed…actually, just about everything’s been completely overhauled.
Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small neighbor galaxy to the Milky Way about 160,000 light-years from Earth, the Tarantula Nebula has thousands of young stars embedded in a radiant honeycomb-like structure of gas and dust.
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The galaxy’s light took about 12.5 billion years to reach the James Webb Space Telescope, meaning the instrument saw the black holes a little more than one billion years after the Big Bang.
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Since the James Webb Space Telescope started collecting data in 2022, it has found puzzling objects dubbed little red dots. A new study suggests they might be giant black holes with some characteristics of stars.