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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…
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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…
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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…