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Pulsar Jackpot Reveals Globular Cluster’s Inner Structure
The Milky Way is chock-full of star clusters. Some contain just a few tens-to-hundreds of young stars. Others, known as globular clusters, are among the oldest objects in the Universe and contain up to a million ancient stars. Some globular clusters are thought to be fragments of our galaxy, chiseled off when the Milky Way…
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Image Release: New Radar Map Reveals the Moon’s Hidden Geology
As the public prepares for the upcoming eclipse, astronomers have released a striking new radar view of the Moon. Researchers from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum are using radio telescopes at the Arecibo Observatory and Green Bank Observatory to map the Moon with radar. The radar signals, transmitted from the Arecibo telescope and…
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GBT Captures Orion Blazing Bright in Radio Light
A team of astronomers has unveiled a striking new image of the Orion Molecular Cloud (OMC) – a bustling stellar nursery teeming with bright, young stars and dazzling regions of hot, glowing gas. The researchers used the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia to study a 50 light-year long filament…
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Green Bank Telescope Aids in Finding Lost Spacecraft
Finding a tiny lost space-craft at a distance of 270,000 miles away may seem impossible, but NASA scientists have done just that. Using a new radar technique, they have located India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft which has been lost since August 2009, the last time any communication was received from it. Chandrayaan-1, India’s first mission to the…
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Pasadena News Now: Local High School Students Hunt for Pulsars
Hanaa is hunting for a blip in a vast set of data. Although she is only a high school student, she is searching for the signal of a pulsar — a rapidly rotating neutron star that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation like a lighthouse. Hanaa and 19 of her fellow students at Alverno Heights…
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Clandestine Black Hole May Represent New Population
06/29/2016: Astronomers combined data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) [and the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope] to find out that there is a peculiar source of radio waves originally thought to be a distant galaxy. As it turns…
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Twisty molecules with ‘handedness’ that are essential to life found in deep space
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06/14/2016: A Molecule In Space Could Help Us Understand The Origin Of Life On Earth
Are your molecules lefties or righties? There are a lot of concepts that help life exist here on Earth. One is as simple as whether a molecule is right handed or left handed. As straightforward as it is, we still don’t know how the molecules got that way. But a recent discovery of a molecule…