GBT tagged posts

A team led by researchers at MIT has discovered that a distant interstellar cloud contains an abundance of pyrene, a type of large, carbon-containing molecule known as a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH).

The discovery of pyrene in this far-off cloud, which is similar to the collection of dust and gas that eventually became our own solar system, suggests that pyrene may have been the source of much of the carbon in our solar system...

GBT reveals hydrogen clouds flying out of the Milky Way in the Fermi Bubbles. Credit: Illustration and Design: V. Vosteen; Photo: S. Brunier (GBO/AUI/NSF)

A team has discovered what appears to be a grand exodus of >100 hydrogen clouds streaming away from the center of the Milky Way and heading into intergalactic space. This observation, made with the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope (GBT), may give astronomers a clearer picture of the so-called Fermi Bubbles, giant balloons of superheated gas billowing out above and below the disk of our galaxy.

“The center of the Milky Way is a special place,” notes Jay Lockman, an astronomer at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia...