By cleverly unraveling the workings of a natural cosmic lens, astronomers have gained a rare glimpse of the violent assembly of a young galaxy in the early Universe.
The Expanded Very Large Array, part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, took a giant step toward completion on August 7 with successful testing of advanced digital hardware designed to combine signals from its upgraded radio-telescope antennas to produce high resolution images of celestial objects.
Radio-telescope images have revealed previously-unseen galactic cannibalism — a triggering event that leads to feeding frenzies by gigantic black holes at the cores of galaxies.
Through a stroke of luck, astronomers have witnessed the first violent moments of a stellar explosion known as a supernova.
Astronomers have found the remains of the youngest supernova, or exploded star, in our Galaxy.
An international project to make the world’s most productive ground-based telescope 10 times more capable has reached its halfway mark and is on schedule to provide astronomers with an extremely powerful new tool for exploring the Universe.
Astronomers have produced a scientific gold mine of detailed, high-quality images of nearby galaxies that is yielding important new insights into many aspects of galaxies, including their complex structures, how they form stars, the motions of gas in the galaxies, the relationship of normal matter to unseen dark matter, and many others.
Astronomers have found an enormous hole in the Universe, nearly a billion light-years across, empty of both normal matter such as stars, galaxies, and gas, and the mysterious, unseen dark matter.
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is teaming with NASA’s upcoming Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope to allow astronomers to use both the orbiting facility and ground-based radio telescopes to maximize their scientific payoff.
Astronomers using the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array radio telescope have greatly strengthened the case that supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies may have formed through mergers of smaller black holes.
