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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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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…
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02/24/2016: Pulsar web could detect gravitational waves
Researchers are studying the best way to use pulsars to detect signals from low-frequency gravitational waves, like those from colliding supermassive black holes. The recent detection of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) came from two black holes, each about 30 times the mass of our sun, merging into one. Gravitational waves…
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02/22/2016: Fast Radio Bursts observed
The universe is a vast and mysterious space, filled with distant and puzzling objects, but UW-Madison physics professor Peter Timbie has played a huge role in helping to demystify it by giving us a deeper understanding of the incredibly rare cosmological phenomenon called Fast Radio Burst: a singular pulse of radio signal. Timbie and his…
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02/10/2016: Production company documents life in Green Bank
When New York production company Partisan Pictures was given the task to film and produce a three-part series about technology and the Internet, the crew searched for interesting stories to include and came across Green Bank – the small town at the center of the National Radio Quiet Zone. It didn’t take long for Partisan…
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02/03/2016: The Cosmic Gift Of Neutron Stars: A Live-Blog Event
If you take normal matter — something made of protons, neutrons and electrons — and compress it as far as it will go, something incredible happens. At high enough temperatures and densities, something requiring a tremendous amount of mass hundreds of thousands of times as great as planet Earth, nuclear fusion occurs, giving rise to…
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02/02/2016: Giant Cloud Came from the Milky Way
T The Milky Way enjoys a light drizzle throughout its galactic year. These cosmic raindrops are speedy clouds of mostly hydrogen gas that rain down onto our galaxy’s spiral disk. They fly through space at hundreds of kilometers per second (millions of miles per hour) and don’t rotate with the Milky Way. They’re appropriately named…
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01/28/2016: Monstrous cloud boomerangs back to our galaxy
Though hundreds of enormous high-velocity gas clouds whiz around the outskirts of our galaxy, this so-called “Smith Cloud” is unique because its trajectory is well known. Hubble Space Telescope astronomers are finding that the old adage, “What goes up, must come down” even applies to an immense cloud of hydrogen gas outside our Milky Way…