Featured News
National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)
15 Oct 2019, 17:00 UTC
At the center of a galaxy called NGC 1068, a supermassive black hole hides within a thick doughnut-shaped cloud of dust and gas. When astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and its international partners (NRAO/ESO/NAOJ), ALMA is among the most complex and powerful astronomical observatories on Earth or in space. The telescope is an array of 66 high-precision dish antennas in northern Chile. See more here to study this cloud in more detail, they made an unexpected discovery that could explain why supermassive black holes grew so rapidly in the early Universe. “Thanks to the spectacular resolution of ALMA, we measured the movement of gas in the inner orbits around the black hole,” explains Violette Impellizzeri of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), working at ALMA in Chile and lead author on a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal. “Surprisingly, we found two disks of gas rotating in opposite directions.”Supermassive black holes already existed when the Universe was young – just a billion years after the Big Bang. But how these extreme objects, whose masses are up to billions of times the mass of the Sun, had time ...
Going Against the Flow Around a Supermassive Black Hole
15 Oct 2019, 17:00 UTC
At the center of a galaxy called NGC 1068, a supermassive black hole hides within a thick doughnut-shaped cloud of dust and gas. When astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and its international partners (NRAO/ESO/NAOJ), ALMA is among the most complex and powerful astronomical observatories on Earth or in space. The telescope is an array of 66 high-precision dish antennas in northern Chile. See more here to study this cloud in more detail, they made an unexpected discovery that could explain why supermassive black holes grew so rapidly in the early Universe. “Thanks to the spectacular resolution of ALMA, we measured the movement of gas in the inner orbits around the black hole,” explains Violette Impellizzeri of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), working at ALMA in Chile and lead author on a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal. “Surprisingly, we found two disks of gas rotating in opposite directions.”Supermassive black holes already existed when the Universe was young – just a billion years after the Big Bang. But how these extreme objects, whose masses are up to billions of times the mass of the Sun, had time ...
MIT
15 Oct 2019, 08:42 UTC
Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have used a massive cluster of galaxies as an X-ray magnifying glass to peer back in time, to nearly 9.4 billion years ago. In the process, they spotted a tiny dwarf galaxy in its very first, high-energy stages of star formation.
Astronomers use giant galaxy cluster as X-ray magnifying lens
15 Oct 2019, 08:42 UTC
Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have used a massive cluster of galaxies as an X-ray magnifying glass to peer back in time, to nearly 9.4 billion years ago. In the process, they spotted a tiny dwarf galaxy in its very first, high-energy stages of star formation.
Kavli Institute for Cosmology, Cambridge
14 Oct 2019, 07:40 UTC
Members of KICC since its foundation and longstanding members of the Planck collaboration, Prof. George Efstathiou and Dr. Steven Gratton recently uploaded their detailed reanalysis of the Planck satellite Cosmic Microwave Background data to the arXiv preprint server.
Further Planck data now available
14 Oct 2019, 07:40 UTC
Members of KICC since its foundation and longstanding members of the Planck collaboration, Prof. George Efstathiou and Dr. Steven Gratton recently uploaded their detailed reanalysis of the Planck satellite Cosmic Microwave Background data to the arXiv preprint server.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
11 Oct 2019, 13:00 UTC
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope sees galaxies of all shapes, sizes, luminosities and orientations in the cosmos. Sometimes, the telescope gazes at a galaxy oriented sideways — as shown here. The spiral galaxy featured in this Hubble image is called NGC 3717, and it is located about 60 million light-years away in the constellation of Hydra (the Sea Serpent).
Hubble Snaps Spiral's Profile
11 Oct 2019, 13:00 UTC
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope sees galaxies of all shapes, sizes, luminosities and orientations in the cosmos. Sometimes, the telescope gazes at a galaxy oriented sideways — as shown here. The spiral galaxy featured in this Hubble image is called NGC 3717, and it is located about 60 million light-years away in the constellation of Hydra (the Sea Serpent).
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
11 Oct 2019, 07:17 UTC
The discovery of ice deposits in craters scattered across the Moon’s south pole has helped to renew interest in exploring the lunar surface, but no one is sure exactly when or how that ice got there. A new study suggests that while a majority of those deposits are likely billions of years old, some may be more recent.
New Research Sheds Light on the Ages of Lunar Ice Deposits
11 Oct 2019, 07:17 UTC
The discovery of ice deposits in craters scattered across the Moon’s south pole has helped to renew interest in exploring the lunar surface, but no one is sure exactly when or how that ice got there. A new study suggests that while a majority of those deposits are likely billions of years old, some may be more recent.
HubbleSite NewsCenter -- Latest News Releases
10 Oct 2019, 14:00 UTC
Milky Way Raids Intergalactic 'Bank Accounts,' Hubble Study Finds
10 Oct 2019, 14:00 UTC
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
9 Oct 2019, 14:00 UTC
The center of our galaxy is a crowded place: A black hole weighing 4 million times as much as our Sun is surrounded by millions of stars whipping around it at breakneck speeds. This extreme environment is bathed in intense ultraviolet light and X-ray radiation. Yet much of this activity is hidden from our view, obscured by vast swaths of interstellar dust.
Milky Way’s Center Will Be Revealed by NASA’s Webb Telescope
9 Oct 2019, 14:00 UTC
The center of our galaxy is a crowded place: A black hole weighing 4 million times as much as our Sun is surrounded by millions of stars whipping around it at breakneck speeds. This extreme environment is bathed in intense ultraviolet light and X-ray radiation. Yet much of this activity is hidden from our view, obscured by vast swaths of interstellar dust.
Royal Observatory Belgium
9 Oct 2019, 07:07 UTC
An international team of professional and amateur astronomers, which includes Alex Lobel, astronomer at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, has determined in detail how the temperature of four yellow hypergiants increases from 4000 degrees to 8000 degrees and back again in a few decades. They publish their findings in the professional journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Astronomers show how supergiant stars repeatedly cool and heat up
9 Oct 2019, 07:07 UTC
An international team of professional and amateur astronomers, which includes Alex Lobel, astronomer at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, has determined in detail how the temperature of four yellow hypergiants increases from 4000 degrees to 8000 degrees and back again in a few decades. They publish their findings in the professional journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
ESA Space Science
8 Oct 2019, 16:00 UTC
Exoplanet and cosmology discoveries awarded Nobel Prize in Physics
8 Oct 2019, 16:00 UTC
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory News and Features
7 Oct 2019, 15:04 UTC
If you could travel back in time 3.5 billion years, what would Mars look like? The picture is evolving among scientists working with NASA's Curiosity rover. Imagine ponds dotting the floor of Gale Crater, the 100-mile-wide (150-kilometer-wide) ancient basin that Curiosity is exploring. Streams might have laced the crater's walls, running toward its base. Watch history in fast forward, and you'd see these waterways overflow then dry up, a cycle that probably repeated itself numerous times over millions of years. That is the landscape described by Curiosity scientists in a Nature Geoscience paper published today. The authors interpret rocks enriched in mineral salts discovered by the rover as evidence of shallow briny ponds that went through episodes of overflow and drying. The deposits serve as a watermark created by climate fluctuations as the Martian environment transitioned from a wetter one to the freezing desert it is today.
