The closest Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) yet known is providing astronomers with a rare opportunity to gain information vital to understanding these powerful cosmic explosions. Extremely precise radio-telescope observations already have ruled out one proposed mechanism for the bursts.

Using the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array radio telescope, astronomers have discovered a newly-exploded star, or supernova, hidden deep in a dust-enshrouded supernova factory in a galaxy some 140 million light-years from Earth.

New observations with National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope suggest that what was once believed to be an intergalactic cloud of unknown distance and significance, is actually a previously unrecognized satellite galaxy of the Milky Way orbiting backward around the Galactic center.

An international team of astronomers has discovered that a young galaxy had a central disk of gas in which hundreds of new stars were being born every year — at a time when the Universe was only a fraction of its current age.

In a major breakthrough for understanding what one of them calls ‘the most exotic environment in the Universe,’ a team of astronomers has discovered that powerful radio bursts in pulsars are generated by structures as small as a beach ball.

Dr Rita Colwell, director of the U.S. National Science Foundation, and Dr Catherine Cesarsky, director general of the European Southern Observatory, today signed a historic agreement jointly to construct and operate ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, the world’s largest and most powerful radio telescope operating at millimeter and sub-millimeter wavelengths.