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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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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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…
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6/1/2016: The Galaxy Is Under Pressure To Make Stars
A new study led by Canadian astronomers provides unprecedented insights into the birth of stars. Using observations from the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Hawaii-based James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in the United States, astronomers from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) have discovered that star formation is more regulated by pressure…
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05/30/2016: National Research Council study reveals the galaxy is under pressure to make stars
A new study led by Canadian astronomers provides unprecedented insights into the birth of stars. Using observations from the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Hawaii-based James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in the United States, astronomers from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) have discovered that star formation is more regulated by pressure…
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5/18/2016: Radio observatory on every campus is RRI’s dream
Bengaluru-based Raman Research Institute (RRI) is aiming at making radio astronomy so easily accessible and exciting to undergraduate science students “that they should be able to reach an observatory even in their pyjamas after dinner”. To achieve that, the institute is working on a project – a first in India – to see academic institutions…