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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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‘Ageless’ Silicon throughout Milky Way May Indicate a Well-Mixed Galaxy
As galaxies age, some of their basic chemical elements can also show signs of aging. This aging process can be seen as certain atoms “put on a little weight,” meaning they change into heavier isotopes — atoms with additional neutrons in their nuclei. Surprisingly, new surveys of the Milky Way with the National Science Foundation’s…
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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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Two of the world’s largest dishes will work together
The Green Bank Telescope will work alongside China’s new FAST telescope, to provide observations for the Breakthrough Initiative.
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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…
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Astronomers find first evidence of chiral chemistry in distant cosmic cloud
An organic (if toxic) alcohol could point the way toward finding more “handed” molecules — the kind that make up RNA, DNA, and other building blocks to life. To make life, our bodies require many chemicals to have a certain “handedness,” a left or right orientation called chirality that determines the behavior of those substances…