The Baseline #17: Gravitational Lensing: Focusing On The Cosmos

Fast radio bursts are powerful flashes of light that shine for only milliseconds. Join our host Summer Ash of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory as she talks about how astronomers study these mysterious bursts, and what might be causing them.

NANOGrav’s most recent dataset offers compelling evidence for gravitational waves with oscillations of years to decades. These waves are thought to arise from orbiting pairs of the most massive black holes throughout the Universe: billions of times more massive than the Sun, with sizes larger than the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

New scientific results from the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), the Very Large Array (VLA), and the Green Bank Observatory (GBO) will be revealed at multiple press conferences during the 242nd meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) from June 5-7, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Artificial lasers on Earth are used for everything from scanning grocery items to delicate surgery. But there are also naturally occurring lasers known as astrophysical masers. Join our host Summer Ash of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory as she talks about what these “space lasers” tell astronomers about the Universe.