Category Astronomy/Space

A schematic of the HERMES instrument showing the light path of how star light from the telescope AAT is split into four different channels. Credit: The Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO)

An Australian-led group of astronomers working with European collaborators has revealed the “DNA” of more than 340,000 stars in the Milky Way, which should help them find the siblings of the Sun, now scattered across the sky. This is a major announcement from an ambitious Galactic Archaeology survey, called GALAH, launched in late 2013 as part of a quest to uncover the formulation and evolution of galaxies. When complete, GALAH will investigate more than a million stars.

The GALAH survey used the HERMES spectrograph at the Australian Astronomical Observatory’s (AAO) 3...

DARKNESS (the DARK-speckle Near-infrared Energy-resolved Superconducting Spectrophotometer) can detect planets around the nearest stars. Credit: Image courtesy of University of California – Santa Barbara

Physicists and astronomers commission the most advanced superconducting camera in the world. Somewhere in the vastness of the universe another habitable planet likely exists. And it may not be that far – astronomically speaking – from our own solar system. Distinguishing that planet’s light from its star, however, can be problematic. But an international team led by UC Santa Barbara physicist Benjamin Mazin has developed a new instrument to detect planets around the nearest stars. It is the world’s largest and most advanced superconducting camera...

Can we tell black holes apart? Astrophysicists at Goethe University Frankfurt answer this question by computing images of feeding non-Einsteinian black holes: at present it is hard to tell them apart from standard black holes. Credit: Fromm/Younsi/Mizuno/Rezzolla (Frankfurt)

Astrophysicists have created and compared self-consistent and realistic images of the shadow of an accreting supermassive black hole. The goal was to test if Einsteinian black holes can be distinguished from those in alternative theories of gravity. One of the most fundamental predictions of Einstein’s theory of relativity is the existence of black holes...

This image was taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3 as part of an observing program called RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey). RELICS imaged 41 massive galaxy clusters with the aim of finding the brightest distant galaxies for the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope to study. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, RELICS

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a massive galaxy cluster glowing brightly in the darkness. Despite its beauty, this cluster bears the distinctly unpoetic name of PLCK G308.3-20.2. Galaxy clusters can contain thousands of galaxies all held together by the glue of gravity...