Category: News

  • 4/1/16: He Drew the Sun for 40 Years, but now his Telescope is Dying

    Most mornings, Steve Padilla rides in an open-air elevator to the top of the 150-Foot Solar Tower at Mount Wilson Observatory, in the mountains just east of Los Angeles. When he opens the dome, sunlight beams in. Padilla aligns two mirrors in the century-old telescope, sending a reflection of the Sun toward a lens. Downstairs, a 17-inch…


  • 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…


  • 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,…


  • 3/29/16: Earth-space telescope system produces hot surprise

    The astronomers’ achievement produced a pair of scientific surprises that promise to advance the understanding of quasars, supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies. Astronomers using an orbiting radio telescope in conjunction with four ground-based radio telescopes have achieved the highest resolution, or ability to discern fine detail, of any astronomical observation ever made.…


  • 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.…


  • 03/25/2016: For Some, Einstein’s Space-Time Ripples Have Yet To Break Their Silence

    When leaders of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, announced in February the first-ever direct detection of a gravitational wave, astrophysicists Scott Ransom from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Andrea Lommen at Franklin and Marshall University in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, had mixed feelings. On the one hand, it meant that the team they and…


  • 03/23/2016: AT&T uses low-power antennas to prevent cellular interference with telescope

    AT&T engineered an unusual low-power antenna system inside a radio quiet zone at a snow resort in rural West Virginia, giving thousands of daily smartphone users network access for the first time. Work on the multimillion-dollar solution started in 2013 and took months of testing with engineers at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and…


  • 03/11/2016: Berthoud students discover space anomaly

    Collin Miller describes the slate of speakers at the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers Western Regional Conference in Arizona this weekend: “There’s doctor this, and doctor someone, PhDs, then you have Berthoud High School STEM students.” Miller and fellow high school senior, Xander Pickard, will present the research of a team of six Berthoud students,…