Category: Science

  • 05/23/2016: Science: Nurturing Success From Failure

    On a calm November evening in 1988, the 300 foot radio telescope at Green Bank Observatory collapsed. While the collapse was a huge blow to radio astronomy, it is somewhat surprising that it lasted as long as it did. The radio telescope was proposed in 1960 as a way to fill the observational gap between…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 06/29/2016: Clandestine Black Hole May Represent New Population

    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 out,…

  • 06/15/2016: Twisty molecules with ‘handedness’ that are essential to life found in deep space

    It might be weird to think about molecules as expressing “handedness.” After all, molecules don’t have hands. But there is a class of organic molecules known as chiral molecules that can be thought of as being either left-handed or right-handed, similar to the way we favor one appendage over the other. Basically, chiral molecules with…

  • 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…

  • 06/14/2016: 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…