Mauna Kea
University of Hawaii astronomer Dr. Tomotsugu Goto and colleagues have discovered a giant galaxy surrounding the most distant black hole ever found. The galaxy, which is 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, is as large as the Milky Way galaxy and harbors a supermassive black hole that contains at least a billion times as much matter as does our sun.
Taking advantage of advanced techniques to correct distortions caused by Earth's atmosphere, astronomers used the NSF-supported Gemini Observatory to capture the first images of clouds over the tropics of Titan, Saturn's largest moon.
The images clarify a long-standing mystery linking Titan's weather and surface features, helping astronomers better understand the moon of Saturn, viewed by
An international collaboration of 390 scientists reports the discovery of an outburst of very-high-energy (VHE) gamma radiation from the giant radio galaxy Messier 87 (M 87), accompanied by a strong rise of the radio flux measured from the direct vicinity of its super-massive black hole.
Two University of Hawai'i at Mānoa astronomers have found a binary star-disk system in which each star is surrounded by the kind of dust disk that is frequently the precursor of a planetary system. Doctoral student Rita Mann and Dr. Jonathan Williams used the Submillimeter Array on Mauna Kea, Hawaii to make the observations.
Astronomers are announcing today that they have discovered new tidal debris stripped away from colliding galaxies. The research will be being presented during a press conference at the 214th annual American Astronomical Society meeting in Pasadena, California by Drs.
BERKELEY, CA ? Members of the international Nearby Supernova Factory (SNfactory), a collaboration among the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a consortium of French laboratories, and Yale University, have found a new technique that establishes the intrinsic brightness of Type Ia supernovae more accurately than ever before.
The Nearby Supernova Factory, an international collaboration of astronomers and astrophysicists, has announced that SNIFS, the Supernova Integral Field Spectrograph, achieved ''first light'' during the early morning hours of Tuesday, June 8, when the new instrument acquired its first astronomical target, a Type Ia supernova designated SN 2004ca. Type Ia supernovae are the kind used by astronomers to measure the expansion of the universe.
New distance measurements from faraway galaxies further strengthen the view that the strongest burst of star formation in the universe occurred about two billion years after the Big Bang. Reporting in the April 17 issue of the journal Nature, California Institute of Technology astronomers Scott Chapman and Andrew Blain, along with their United Kingdom colleagues Ian Smail and Rob Ivison, provide the redshifts of 10 extremely distant galaxies which strongly suggest that the most luminous galaxies ever detected were produced over a rather short period of time.
A team of astronomers is using one of the most advanced ground-based telescopes in the world to "zoom-in" on protostars in the Orion Nebula, revealing in unprecedented detail a variety of phenomena associated with star and planet formation in the presence of extremely massive, luminous stars. These phenomena include high-velocity jets of gas launched from the protostars themselves; evaporation flows driven by the intense radiation of nearby massive stars; and colliding winds that form thin, filamentary sheets of gas.
