Category Astronomy/Space

Sagittarius A*. This image was taken with NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Credit: Public domain

A team of researchers from around the world is getting ready to create what might be the first image of a black hole. The project is the result of collaboration between teams manning radio receivers around the world and a team at MIT that will assemble the data from the other teams and hopefully create an image. The project has been ongoing for ~20 years as members have sought to piece together the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).

Each of the 12 participating radio receiving teams will use equipment that has been installed for the project to record data received at a wavelength of 230GHz during April 5 through the 14th...

Imagine being able to view microscopic aspects of a classical nova, a massive stellar explosion on the surface of a white dwarf star (about as big as Earth), in a laboratory rather than from afar via a telescope.

Cosmic detonations of this scale and larger created many of the atoms in our bodies, says MSU’s Christopher Wrede, who presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting. A safe way to study these events in laboratories on Earth is to investigate the exotic nuclei or “rare isotopes” that influence them. “Astronomers observe exploding stars and astrophysicists model them on supercomputers,” said Wrede, physics assistant professor, MSU...

A minor planet in the Solar System will officially be known as Bernardbowen from today after Australian citizen science project theSkyNet won a competition to name the celestial body. The minor planet was named by the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in honour of their founding chairman Dr Bernard Bowen. Bernardbowen sits in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and takes 3.26 Earth years to orbit the Sun.

The minor planet was discovered on October 28, 1991, and until now has been known as (6196) 1991 UO4. Based at ICRAR, theSkyNet has been running since 2011 and sees citizen scientists donating their spare computing power to help Australian astronomers uncover the mysteries of the Universe...

The giant elliptical galaxy NGC 4472. Courtesy of David W. Hogg, Michael R. Blanton, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Collaboration.

The distribution of normal matter precisely determines gravitational acceleration in all common types of galaxies, a team led by Case Western Reserve University researchers reports. The team has shown this radial acceleration relation exists in nearby high-mass elliptical and low-mass spheroidal galaxies, building on last year’s discovery of this relation in spiral and irregular galaxies.

“This demonstrates that we truly have a universal law for galactic systems,” said Federico Lelli, formerly an astronomy postdoctoral fellow at Case Western Reserve University and currently a fellow at the European Southern Observatory...