Featured series 
Tag: Astronomy
-
Science & Tech
Growing supermassive black holes from seeds
Astronomers announced Jan. 12, 2006 that they have found the first sample of intermediate-mass black holes in active galaxies – a discovery that will help in understanding the early universe. “These are local analogues of the `seed’ black holes from which supermassive black holes formed,” said Jenny E. Greene of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics…
-
Science & Tech
Astronomers spot the Great Orion Nebula’s successor
Astronomers announced Jan. 11, 2006, that they have found the next Orion Nebula. Known as W3, this glowing gas cloud in the constellation Cassiopeia has just begun to shine with newborn stars. Shrouds of dust currently hide its light, but this is only a temporary state. In 100,000 years – a blink of the eye…
-
Science & Tech
See-through galaxy
To peer into the galactic center of our own Milky Way galaxy, astronomers Silas Laycock and Josh Grindlay used the unique capabilities of the 6.5-meter-diameter Magellan Telescope in Chile. By gathering infrared light that more easily penetrates dust, the astronomers were able to detect thousands of stars that otherwise would have remained hidden. Their goal…
-
Science & Tech
Going beyond Einstein
Observations by two astronomers confirm one important theory about how a black hole’s extreme gravity can stretch light. The data also paint an intriguing image of how a spinning black hole can drag the very fabric of space around with it, creating a choppy spacetime sea that distorts everything falling into the black hole. Jon…
-
Science & Tech
Scientists find black hole’s ‘point of no return’
By a score of 135 to zero, scientists using NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer have compared suspected neutron stars and black holes and found that the black holes behaved as if each one has an event horizon, the theoretical border from beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape. The team found that X-ray light…
-
Science & Tech
Spitzer puts a new spin on the Helix Nebula
Helix Nebula (NGC 7293) is a challenging stargazing target for amateur astronomers. It is one of the closest planetary nebulas – a type of nebula formed from gas ejected by a dying sunlike star. Yet it is so large and spread out in the sky that it appears very dim in a telescope eyepiece. Long-exposure…
-
Science & Tech
Alien treasures in our backyard
Astronomers have gained an important clue to guide their hunt for extrasolar worlds. And that clue points to the unlikeliest of places — our own backyard. “It’s possible that some of the objects in our solar system actually formed around another star,” says astronomer Scott Kenyon (Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory). How did these adopted worlds join…
-
Science & Tech
Frequent starbursts sterilize center of Milky Way
A scenario in which exploding stars kill all life within the center of our galaxy is detailed by stronomer Antony Stark (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and colleagues in the October 10, 2004, issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The team’s discovery was made possible using the unique capabilities of the Antarctic Submillimeter Telescope and Remote…
-
Science & Tech
Galactic collision reveals fate of Milky Way galaxy
Sixty-eight million light-years away, the Antennae galaxies are locked in a dance of death, with stars being ripped from their orbits and spiral arms being shredded into streamers that dangle in space. Several billion years from now, our home — the Milky Way galaxy — might look the same as the Andromeda galaxy smashes into…
-
Science & Tech
Some globular clusters may be leftovers from snacking galaxies
According to the hierarchical theory of galaxy formation, galaxies have grown larger over time by consuming smaller dwarf galaxies and star clusters. And sometimes, it seems that the unfortunate prey is not swallowed whole but instead is munched like a peach, stripped of its outer layers to leave behind only the pit. New findings by…
-
Science & Tech
Lifeless suns dominated early universe
The very first generation of stars were not at all like our Sun. They were white-hot, massive stars that were very short-lived. Burning for only a few million years, they collapsed and exploded as brilliant supernovae. Those very first stars began the seeding process in the universe, spreading vital elements like carbon and oxygen, which…
-
Science & Tech
Raging storms of hot and cold gas
New observations with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), Hubble’s high-precision and ultra-sensitive spectrometer, show that the warm chromosphere of Betelgeuse extends out to more than 50 times its radius in visible light, a size five times larger than the orbit of Neptune. (The chromosphere is an inner layer of a star’s atmosphere, between the…
-
Science & Tech
Young star caught speeding
Findings linking a speeding star to its birthplace provide direct observational support of theoretical simulations predicting that protostars can be tossed out of a young cluster. This is the first time that such a fast-moving young star has been seen outside of a cluster or binary system. Astronomers Alyssa Goodman (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and…
-
Science & Tech
Suns of all ages possess comets, maybe planets
Astronomers observed a comet puffing out huge amounts of carbon, one of the key elements for life. The comet also emitted large amounts of water vapor as the Sun’s heat baked its outer surface. When combined with previous observations suggesting the presence of evaporating comets near young stars like Beta Pictoris and old stars like…
-
Science & Tech
Planetary survivor strategy: Outeat, outweigh, outlast!
Astronomers Myron Lecar and Dimitar Sasselov have found that planet formation is a contest, where a growing planet must fight for survival lest it be swallowed by the star that initially nurtured it. Of the first 100 stars found to harbor planets, more than 30 stars host a Jupiter-sized world in an orbit smaller than…
-
Campus & Community
Speedy solar storm reaches Earth
An Oct. 28, 2003 eruption created a monstrous solar flare – the third largest recorded since 1976 – and an associated coronal mass ejection, in which superheated gas, called plasma, streaks away from the sun at millions of miles an hour. When the plasma hits the Earth it can disrupt the planet’s magnetic field, triggering…
-
Science & Tech
First supernovae quickly seeded universe with stuff of life
The early universe was a barren wasteland of hydrogen, helium, and a touch of lithium, containing none of the elements necessary for life as we know it. From those primordial gases were born giant stars 200 times as massive as the Sun, burning their fuel at such a prodigious rate that they lived for only…
-
Science & Tech
“Winking star” started winking only recently
In 2002, astronomers at Wesleyan University announced that they had discovered a “winking” star that undergoes a regular, long-lasting (approximately 20 day) eclipse every 48 days. They theorized that those eclipses were caused by intervening blobs of material within a protoplanetary disk surrounding that young star. Harvard astronomer Joshua Winn and colleagues decided to examine…
-
Science & Tech
Asteroid Juno has a bite out of it
Juno, the third asteroid ever discovered, was first spotted by astronomers early in the 19th century. It orbits the Sun with thousands of other bits of space rock in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. One of the largest asteroids, at a size of 150 miles across, Juno essentially is a leftover building…
-
Science & Tech
A pancake, not a doughnut, shapes distant galactic center
Astronomer Lincoln Greenhill (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and colleagues have found direct evidence for a “pancake” of gas and dust at the center of Circinus — a thin, warped disk surrounding the galaxy’s central, supermassive black hole. That disk shapes the galaxy’s nucleus. It shadows different regions from the “glare” of the black hole, a…
-
Science & Tech
State-of-the-art solar model tracks eruption
The Sun may appear to be a bright, steadily shining orb, but it is actually a seething cauldron of hot gases prone to violent eruptions. The most dramatic eruptions are coronal mass ejections (CMEs), in which giant, bubble-shaped balloons of plasma and magnetic field lines blast outward at speeds of up to 1,500 miles per…
-
Science & Tech
Harvard continues legacy of Cepheid discoveries
Cepheids are important to astronomers for their key role as extragalactic distance indicators. Cepheids are variable stars that regularly brighten and dim as they pulsate rhythmically. Their pulsation period is proportional to their intrinsic brightness – the longer the period, the brighter the star. A comparison of intrinsic to apparent brightness yields the distance to…
-
Science & Tech
Do we live in a “stop and go” universe?
At the 202nd meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Robert Kirshner (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), on behalf of the international High-z Supernova Search Team led by Brian Schmidt (Mount Stromlo Observatory), presented evidence that the expanding universe slowed for billions of years before galaxies began accelerating, like cars that get past a bottleneck. “Right now,…
-
Science & Tech
Astronomers link gamma-ray bursts, supernovae
Gamma-ray bursts are incredibly bright flashes of high-energy radiation that likely signal the birth of black holes. Bursts occur at random locations scattered across the sky, and few last more than a minute, making them a challenge to study. A supernova is the explosion of a star at least eight times as massive as the…
-
Science & Tech
Cool X-ray disk points to new type of black hole
Black holes are objects so dense and with a gravitational potential so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape the pull if it ventures too close. Black holes are invisible, yet the gas and dust falling into a black hole are heated to high temperatures and glow furiously. Scientists agree that there are at…
-
Science & Tech
Molecular cloud has a heartbeat
Barnard 68, located 300 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, is a typical example of small, dark molecular clouds known as Bok Globules. Such dense, cold clouds of dust and gas appear black in photos because the dust blocks visible light from background stars. Molecular clouds are stellar nurseries. Young stars form from collapsing molecular…
-
Science & Tech
First Milky Ways found at edge of universe
One key question that has puzzled astronomers for decades is: When did the first stars and galaxies form after the Big Bang occurred? The answer — very quickly! Astronomers Rennan Barkana of Tel Aviv University and Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics found the first direct evidence that galaxies as large as the…
-
Science & Tech
Hypergiant star erupts
In the year 2000, the star Rho Cassiopeiae, n the constellation of Cassiopeia, lost more mass than in any other stellar eruption observed by astronomers. An international team of astronomers, led by astrophysicist Alex Lobel of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, observed the huge eruption, which blasted nearly 10,000 times the mass of the Earth…
-
Science & Tech
Young star cluster found aglow with mysterious X-ray cloud
Known as RCW 38, a star cluster covers a region about 5 light years across. It contains thousands of stars formed less than a million years ago and appears to be forming new stars even today. The crowded environment of a star cluster is thought to be conducive to the production of hot gas, but…
-
Science & Tech
Harvard science historian publishes results of unprecedented 30-year census of Copernican masterpiece
First published in 1543, Nicholas Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium introduced the world to the concept of a sun-centered universe. In it, Copernicus detailed how the motions of the sun, moon, planets, and stars could be explained if the earth orbited the sun — a revolutionary idea. Starting in the 1970s, researcher Owen Gingerich began…