Featured series 
Tag: Astrophysics
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Science & Tech
Astronomers detect dust disks around very young brown dwarfs in the Orion Nebula
The results of recent observations by an international team of astronomers suggest that brown dwarfs share a common origin with stars. Brown dwarfs are more similar in nature to stars than to planets and, like stars, have the potential to form with accompanying systems of planets. The observation by the researchers of dusty protoplanetary disks…
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Science & Tech
Star factory near galactic center bathed in high-energy X-rays
A team of astronomers, including some from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has looked into the core of our own Milky Way galaxy and discovered a new phenomenon. The “cauldron” of 60-million-degree gas surrounding a group of young stars in the Arches Cluster supports earlier theoretical predictions about what happens when solar winds from massive…
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Science & Tech
Chandra sees wealth of black holes in star-forming galaxies
Three independent teams of research scientists, including one from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to find what they suspect are groups of mid-mass black holes in starburst galaxies. In a starburst galaxy, stars form and explode at an unusually high rate. The discovery could help explain the relationship among mid-mass…
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Science & Tech
A quasar’s identity may simply be in eye of beholder
A quasar is a super-massive black hole; quasars are among the most energetic objects in the Universe. Most quasars are extremely bright in optical light, but about 10 percent of them appear hidden by clouds of gas and dust. Are these 10 percent different from the rest of the quasars? Astronomers have debated whether these…
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Science & Tech
Chandra reveals nest of tight binaries in dense cluster
Observations from a scientific team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have revealed that an incredibly dense star cluster known as 47 Tucanae includes many binary stars. Most of the binary star systems in 47 Tucanae are systems in which a normal, Sun-like companion orbits a collapsed star, either a white dwarf or a neutron…
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Young star may be belching spheres of gas, astronomers say
Observations by astronomers of a young star in the constellation Cepheus, more than 2000 lights-years away, suggest that it is repeatedly belching spheres of gas. Current theories about how young stars shed matter would not have predicted such eruptions. In order to remain stable while accumulating matter, young stars have to throw off some of…
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Science & Tech
Chandra pinpoints edge of accretion disk around black hole
An object known as XTE J1118+480 is a black hole roughly seven times the mass of our Sun. XTE J1118+480 is locked in a close binary orbit with a Sun-like star. Recent observations by a team of scientists led by a researcher from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics show an “accretion disk” around the black…
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Science & Tech
Gamma-ray astronomers detect “extreme” galaxies
Gamma rays from X-ray emitting galaxies seem to signal the existence of what astronomers are calling “extreme” galaxies. An international team of astrophysicists made the discovery of very-high-energy gamma rays, confirming the hypothesis of an Italian group that galaxies which emit strongly in the highest energy X-rays would also emit the most energetic gamma rays.…
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Science & Tech
Is E.T. flashing us?
Harvard recently broke ground for a new telescope to look for extraterrestrial beacons. This instrument will be capable of covering a million times more celestial space than the present instrument the University uses for its alien search. “A high-intensity pulsed laser, teamed with a moderate sized telescope, forms an efficient interstellar beacon,” says Physics Professor…
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Science & Tech
Dark night sky tells us about structure and formation of solar system
The darkness of the night sky is one of astronomy’s great puzzles. An infinite universe uniformly filled with stars and galaxies should produce an infinitely bright night sky, Johannes Kepler concluded 400 years ago. So why is the sky dark? It has to do with the finite size of the Milky Way Galaxy and the…
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Science & Tech
Uncovering new evidence for ‘event horizons’ surrounding black holes
With results that fundamentally differ from earlier black hole studies, Harvard researchers have shown that some recently discovered black holes are not only ultra-dense, but actually possess event horizons that “vacuum up” energy from their surroundings. “Watching matter flowing into a black hole is like sitting upstream of a waterfall and watching the water seemingly…
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Science & Tech
Chandra X-ray Observatory helps put pieces together on gamma-ray bursts
Astronomers have long debated how gamma-ray bursts (or “GRBs”) originate. One theory contends that GRBs result when two “compact objects,” that is, neutron stars or black holes, collide and coalesce. Another theory speculates that a “hypernova,” a gigantic star collapsing on itself under its own weight, could cause these extremely energetic outbursts. An international team…
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Science & Tech
Astronomers resolve visible blast wave from gamma-ray burst
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are mysterious flashes of high-energy light that are detected about once a day somewhere in the sky. However, their origin remains unknown to astronomers, most of whom believe GRBs are enormous explosions that occur far across the Universe. Now for the first time, astronomers have resolved the visible blast wave produced by…
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Science & Tech
Chandra clinches case for missing-link black hole
Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, scientists have zeroed in on a mid-mass black hole in the galaxy M82. This black hole – located 600 light years away from the center of a galaxy – may represent the missing link between smaller stellar black holes and the supermassive variety found at the centers of galaxies. The…
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Cosmic ‘superbubbles’ bespeak toil and trouble
The merging Antennae Galaxies in constellation Corvus are producing massive bubbles of expanding X-ray-emitting gas at such astonishing rates that they are bumping into each other. Giuseppina Fabbiano, Andreas Zezas and Stephen Murray of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to capture in unprecedented detail this phenomenon. Fabbiano said that the…
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Science & Tech
Mystery of cometary X-rays solved
Comets, which resemble “dirty snow balls” a few miles in diameter, until recently were thought to be too cold to emit X-rays. So the detection of X-rays from comet Hyakutake in 1996 was a surprise. Several explanations were suggested, but the source of cometary X-ray emission remained a puzzle. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in July…
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Chandra discovers elusive ‘hot bubble’ in planetary nebula
A planetary nebula (so called because it looks like a planet when viewed with a small telescope) is formed when a dying red giant star puffs off its outer layer, leaving behind a hot core that will eventually collapse to form a dense star called a white dwarf. According to theory, a “hot bubble” is…
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Science & Tech
Nebula resembles gigantic cosmic crossbow
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory captured the details of a compact nebula that resembles a gigantic cosmic crossbow. The nebula, located in the Vela supernova remnant, is created as a rapidly rotating neutron star, or pulsar, spins out rings and jets of high energy particles while shooting through space. The X-ray jet can be traced all…
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Science & Tech
Gamma rays may be left over from cosmic construction project
The origin of the diffuse and pervasive background of gamma-ray radiation that exists over the universe has been one of the great unsolved mysteries in cosmology. Even the known population of powerful extragalactic gamma-ray sources, called “blazars,” can account for no more than a quarter of the gamma-ray background radiation that is observed. According to…
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Cosmic pressure fronts mapped by Chandra
The collision of two giant clusters of galaxies has been imaged by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. For the first time, the pressure fronts in this system, which has been compared to a cosmic “weather system,” can be traced in detail. “We can compare this to an intergalactic cold front,” said Maxim Markevitch of the Harvard-Smithsonian…
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Science & Tech
South Pole telescope sees origin of starbursts
Astronomers have seen how star formation occurs in the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy by using a telescope based at the South Pole. The observations contribute to our knowledge of how stars form in “bursts” near the center of the galaxy at roughly 500-million-year intervals. The scientists were able to show that a…
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Science & Tech
New detector may open new window on the universe
A new receiver is capable of detecting and amplifying very-high- frequency signals with very fine frequency resolution, so it can detect the spectral lines, or chemical fingerprints, of interstellar molecules that emit radio signals at terahertz frequencies — the highest frequencies ever achieved with any radio receiver. The unique detector of astronomical radiation, developed at…
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Science & Tech
Chandra finds “cool” black hole at heart of Andromeda Galaxy
A team of scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., reported that the gas funneling into a supermassive black hole in the heart of the Andromeda Galaxy, designated as “M31,” is a “cool” million degrees Celsius. This unexpected result adds one more quirk to the strange behavior previously observed at the center…
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Little giants create a big cosmic controversy
A new measuring technique used to determine the distances to a class of stars called “Red Clumps” in the Large Magellanic Cloud produced a much smaller distance than that found by other popular methods of measurement. The smaller distance means that the universe may be expanding faster than previously thought — a finding which has…
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Science & Tech
Streamers of gas feed beast at center of our galaxy
Astronomers have long known that a supermassive black hole, more than 2 million times more massive than our Sun, lies at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy some 27,000 light-years from Earth. A point-like source of radio emission called Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”) marks the location of this black hole. Now researchers Robin S.…
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21 moons ‘swarm’ planet Uranus
In 1999 three new moons were discovered orbiting Uranus, a great gasball of a planet about 2 billion miles from Earth. The discovery raised the number of Uranian moons to 21, the most, as far as is known, in the skies of any planet. Researchers believe the moons were “captured” billions of years ago. “We…