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04/20/2016: The Town without Wifi
You can’t make a call or send a text on your cell phone in Green Bank, West Virginia. Wireless Internet is outlawed, as is Bluetooth. As you approach the tiny town on a two-lane road that snakes through the Allegheny Mountains, the bars on your cell phone fall like dominoes, and the scan function on…
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04/14/2016: The monstrous temperature of a black hole
Quasars are singular regions of the universe, very compact and very light surrounding a supermassive black hole. And this is precisely the black hole of 3C273 that attracted the attention of scientists, who have tried to determine its temperature. To do this, they have combined efforts of ground and space measuring instruments and thus requested…
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03/31/2016: Researchers discover incredibly rare triple star system
According to a newly-published study, a rare triple-star system containing a planet in a stable orbit was recently discovered by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Published in the Astronomical Journal, the study detailed the discovery of distant world, known as KELT-4Ab. While the planet orbits one star in the system, that star is…
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03/30/2016: The extremely hot heart of quasar 3C273
Scientists combined telescopes on Earth and in space to learn that this famous quasar has a core temperature hotter than 10 trillion degrees! That’s much hotter than formerly thought possible. By combining signals recorded from radio antennas on Earth and in space – effectively creating a telescope of almost 8-Earth-diameters in size – scientists have,…
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03/26/2016: Reflections: Looking for peace and quiet? Go to West Virginia
I was sitting at my favorite corner table, enjoying a cup of coffee and a plate of bacon and eggs. While scanning the front page of the Record-Eagle, I noticed a man sitting alone at a table facing me. He was looking my way and talking but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.…
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03/26/2016: Green Bank’s Quiet Zone gets mobile service
For years, Green Bank has been known as the Quiet Zone but thanks to AT&T some parts are about to get loud. Green Bank West Virginia is home to the world’s largest steerable telescope and it’s located at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Pocahontas County. For more than 20 years, the enormous telescope has…
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03/09/2016: All We Are is Dust in the Interstellar Wind
Cosmic dust is not simply something to sweep under the rug and forget about. Instead, National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded astronomers are studying and even mapping it to learn more about what it might be hiding from us, where it comes from, and what it’s turning into. Some researchers are delving deep down to see how…
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02/25/2016: Mysterious radio burst pinpointed in distant galaxy
For the first time, astronomers have traced an enigmatic blast of radio waves to its source. Since 2007, astronomers have detected curious bright blasts of radio waves from the cosmos, each lasting no more than a few milliseconds. Now scientists have been able to pinpoint the source of one of these pulses: a galaxy 1.9…