Winners in NRAO’s VLA 40th Anniversary Image Contest are from around the world, and their works illustrate a fascinating variety of celestial objects. Entries combined observational data from the VLA with data from optical, infrared, and X-ray telescopes, and from computer simulations.

The Very Large Array (VLA) turns 40 years old on October 10, and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory is hosting a day-long virtual celebration that day.

Socorro, New Mexico, has a written history going back more than 400 years. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope is well known to professional and amateur astronomers around the world. However, millions of people undoubtedly first heard of Socorro and the VLA when Warner Brothers released the movie Contact in July of 1997.

To help celebrate the VLA’s 40th anniversary, the National Radio Astronomy is conducting an image contest, and offering cash prizes for visually compelling works that incorporate radio observational data from the VLA.

A new image from the VLA dramatically reveals the extended magnetic field of a spiral galaxy seen edge-on from Earth.

Something done routinely for decades — move VLA antennas into a new configuration — suddenly became challenging because of COVID-19. With careful planning and a lot of teamwork, the NRAO staff got the job done to keep the scientific research going.

An international team of astronomers has created the most detailed map yet of the atmosphere of the red supergiant star Antares.

Some young, still-forming stars are surrounded by regions of complex organic molecules called “hot corinos.” In some pairs of young stars forming together as binary pairs, astronomers found a hot corino around one, but not the other. Guessing that the unseen one might be obscured by dust, researchers studied such a pair with the VLA at radio wavelengths that readily pass through dust, and found the other one.

Analysis of two cosmic explosions indicates to astronomers that the pair, along with a puzzling blast from 2018, constitute a new type of event, with similarities to some supernovae and gamma-ray bursts, but also with significant differences.

Using VLA and Spitzer observations, astronomers are able to determine wind speeds on a brown dwarf for the first time. They believe the technique also could be used for exoplanets.