Giant Magellan Telescope Signs Contract for Telescope Structure
Cambridge, MA -
DESI Opens Its 5,000 Eyes to Capture the Colors of the Cosmos
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Cambridge, MA -
A new instrument mounted atop a telescope in Arizona has aimed its robotic array of 5,000 fiber-optic "eyes" at the night sky and captured the first images showing its un...
Feeding the Supermassive Black Holes in Galaxies
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When cold gas and dust accretes onto the supermassive black hole at a galaxy's core, the galactic nucleus can become activated and eject jets of rapidly moving charged particles. These pa...
The Rotation of Venus
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Venus is covered in a thick layer of clouds, one reason that it appears so bright in the sky. Ancient astronomers had a good idea of what (since Copernicus) we know as its orbital period;...
The Nature of Obscured Active Galactic Nuclei
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Most galaxies host a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at their nucleus, one whose mass exceeds a million solar-masses. When material actively accretes onto the SMBH, associated processes ca...
Scientists Observe Year-long Plateaus in Decline of Type Ia Supernova Light Curves
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Scientists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have announced the discovery that, contrary to previously accepted knowledge, Type Ia supernovae exp...
The Hot X-Ray Gas in Giant Elliptical Galaxies
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The oldest known large galactic structures in the universe are giant elliptical galaxies. Unlike our Milky Way and other spiral galaxies, elliptical galaxies have no spiral arms and littl...
Heating the Solar Corona
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The hot outer layer of the sun, the corona, has a temperature of over a million degrees Kelvin, much more than the surface temperature of the Sun which is only about 5500 degrees Kelvin. ...
Announcement of the Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope Design Program
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Cambridge, MA -
The National Science Foundation has just announced the award of a $12.7M grant to architect and design a next-generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT) to carry out a pr...
Bright Galaxy Clusters in the Era of Peak Star Formation
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Galaxies actively engaged in making stars produce many hot massive stars that emit copious amounts of uv radiation. The neutral hydrogen gas in these galaxies (or in the intervening inter...