VLA tagged posts

The cosmos has served up a gift for a group of scientists who have been searching for one of the most elusive phenomena in the night sky. Their study, presented in Science Advances, reports on the very first observations of a swirling vortex in spacetime caused by a rapidly rotating black hole.

The process, known as Lense-Thirring precession or frame-dragging, describes how black holes twist the spacetime that surrounds them, dragging nearby objects like stars and wobbling their orbits along the way.

Discovery of ...

Using the Very Large Array (VLA), an international team of astronomers have observed a nearby galaxy merger known as CIZA J0107.7+5408. Results of the observational campaign, presented December 20 on the preprint server arXiv, could help us better understand the merging processes that take place between galaxy clusters.

Galaxy clusters contain up to thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity. They generally form as a result of mergers and grow by accreting subclusters...

VLA teams up with Juno spacecraft to study Jupiter’s atmosphere, and ALMA reveals new details about Io’s volcanoes. While the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) frequently reveal important new facts about objects far beyond our own Milky Way Galaxy — at distances of many millions or billions of light-years — they also are vital tools for unraveling much closer mysteries, right here in our own Solar System...

Astronomers have found dramatic evidence that a black hole or neutron star spiraled its way into the core of a companion star and caused that companion to explode as a supernova. The astronomers were tipped off by data from the Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS), a multi-year project using the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA).

“Theorists had predicted that this could happen, but this is the first time we’ve actually seen such an event,” said Dillon Dong, a graduate student at Caltech and lead author on a paper reporting the discovery in the journal Science.

The first clue came when the scientists examined images from VLASS, which began observations in 2017, and found an object brightly emitting radio waves but ...