Location, location, and location: the old real-estate adage about what’s really important proved applicable to astrophysics as astronomers used the sharp radio vision of the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array to pinpoint the distance to a pulsar.
Giant Gas Cloud Made of Atoms Formed in First Stars
Astronomers studying the most distant quasar yet found in the Universe have discovered a massive reservoir of gas containing atoms made in the cores of some of the first stars ever formed.
VLBA Reveals Dust-Enshrouded ‘Supernova Factory’
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.
Giant Cosmic Lens Reveals Secrets of Distant Galaxy
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.
Pulsar Bursts Coming From Beachball-Sized Structures
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.
Astronomers Trace Microquasar’s Path Back in Time
Astronomers have traced the orbit through our Milky Way Galaxy of a voracious neutron star and a companion star it is cannibalizing, and conclude that the pair joined more than 30 million years ago and probably were catapulted out of a cluster of stars far from the Galaxy’s center.