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04/21/2016: Hunt Continues for Gravitational Waves from Black Hole Megamergers
The sound of merging supermassive black holes does not saturate the universe. For the past decade, scientists with the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) collaboration have been listening for a constant “hum” of low-frequency gravitational waves. Theoretical work suggests that this hum — generated by collisions involving supermassive black holes, which contain…
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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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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…