Category Astronomy/Space

An image of the distribution of GRBs on the sky at a distance of 7 billion light years, centred on the newly discovered ring. The positions of the GRBs are marked by blue dots and the Milky Way is indicated for reference, running from left to right across the image. Credit: L. Balazs.

5 billion light years is a distance almost inconceivable, even on a cosmic scale ie 35,000 galaxies the size of our Milky Way are needed to cover that distance. Hungarian-U.S. team have now found a structure this big really exists in the observable universe.

The researchers found a ring of 9 gamma ray bursts (GRBs)—the most luminous events in the universe—5B light yrs in diameter, and having a nearly regular circular shape, with a 1 in 20,000 probability of the GRBs being in this distribution by chance...

A NASA worker in a clean room at the National Space Science Technology Center in Huntsville, Alabama, checks out the CLASP instrument prior to shipping to White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico for Sept. 3 launch. Credits: NASA/MSFC

Imagine trying to study a specific region of the sun, eg, from a vantage point some 93 M miles away, probing that area at a level of precision <0.1% – with <5 minutes to do the job. That’s what NASA’s CLASP instrument is for, a joint effort b/n US, Japan, Spain and France, that was flown Sept 3 to an altitude of 167 miles. CLASP is shorthand for the Chromospheric Lyman-Alpha Spectro-Polarimeter, a high-tech telescope that studies the sun for some 300 seconds.

During that time, CLASP will delivered the first-ever measurement of the magnetic field in the sun’s m...

The image at the top of the page shows a jet of particles shooting out of the black hole at the center of galaxy M87. ( Avery E. Broderick, University of Waterloo/Perimeter Institute)

Using NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) satellite observatory, the team detected the high-energy x-rays from 5 supermassive black holes previously clouded from direct view by dust and gas. The research, led by astronomers at Durham University, UK, supports the theory that potentially millions more supermassive black holes exist in the Universe, but are hidden from view.

The scientists pointed NuSTAR at 9 candidate hidden supermassive black holes that were thought to be extremely active at the centre of galaxies, but where the full extent of this activity was potentially obscured from view...

Two ‘twin’ stars with identical spectra observed by the La Silla Telescope. Since it is known that one star is 40 parsecs away, the difference in their apparent brightnesses allows calculation of the second star’s distance. Credit: Carolina Jofre

A new, highly accurate method of measuring distances between stars, could be used to measure the size of the galaxy, enabling greater understanding of how it evolved. Using a technique which searches out stellar ‘twins’, they have been able to measure distances between stars with far greater precision than is possible using typical model-dependent methods. It will complement to Gaia satellite, which is creating a 3D map of the sky over 5 yrs, and could aid in the understanding of fundamental astrophysical processes at work far away.

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