Astronomers Peer Deeper and Farther Into the Cosmos in Search of AGN
The nuclei of most galaxies host supermassive black holes with millions or even billions of solar-masses of material. Material in the vicinity of such black…
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics News
Is Dark Matter Composed of Primordial Black Holes?
Astronomers studying the motions of galaxies and the character of the cosmic microwave background radiation came to realize in the last century that most of…
New Model Supports Connection Between Gamma Ray Bursts and Supernovae
A “core-collapse” supernova occurs when the iron core of a massive star collapses under the force of gravity and then rebounds, generating pressure waves and…
ALMA Reveals Rings and Gaps in Developing Planetary System Elias 24
The discovery of an exoplanet has most often resulted from the monitoring of a star’s flicker (the transiting method) or its wobble (the radial velocity…
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite Ready to Search the Sky for New Worlds
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is undergoing final preparations in Florida for its April 16 launch to find undiscovered worlds around nearby stars, providing…
“Finding Life in Outer Space” – Travel Across Time and Space Exploring Why Life Exists
On Sunday, March 25, a new program called “Finding Life in Outer Space” will debut on the Smithsonian Channel. The scientific lead for this program…
Astronomers Discover Ionized Molecules in Galaxy Markarian 231
There is a process at work in most galaxies that affects both the central black hole mass as well as the galaxy’s global velocity structure…
ALMA Images Molecular Outflow from Luminous Galaxy NGC 6240
A merger between galaxies can trigger intense radiation from bursts of star formation and from the accretion of gas onto the two supermassive black holes…
Astronomers Discover a Stellar System with Three Super Earths
Over 3500 extra-solar planets have been confirmed to date. Most of them were discovered using the transit method, and astronomers can combine the transit light…
Outbursts From Supermassive Black Hole Transform Exoplanets
A team of astrophysicists and planetary scientists has predicted that Neptune-like planets located near the center of the Milky Way galaxy have been transformed into…
Astronomers Discover Two New Massive Stars in the Galactic Center
Some galaxies in the universe are as much as a thousand times more luminous than our Milky Way galaxy, with most of their light being…
New Simulations of Magnetic Reconnection in the Sun
The Sun glows with a surface temperature of about 5,500 degrees Celsius (9,900 degrees Fahrenheit). On the other hand, its hot outer layer, the corona,…
Chandra Identifies X-Ray Emission from the Nuclear Region of Arp 220
The galaxy Arp 220 is ultraluminous (defined as having more than about 300 times the luminosity of our own galaxy) and, at a distance of…
Observations of Massive Galaxies in the Early Universe Reveal Rare Dark-Matter Haloes
The South Pole Telescope (SPT) is a 10-meter-diameter telescope in the Antarctic that has been operating at millimeter- and submillimeter-waves for a decade; the CfA…
Kepler Continues to Surprise, Detects Transiting Exocomets
There are currently over 3500 confirmed exoplanets known thanks to the remarkable sensitivity of the Kepler spacecraft and to technological advances in space and ground-based…
Scientists Use a New Method to Investigate the Nature of Axions
An axion is a hypothetical elementary particle whose existence was postulated in order to explain why certain subatomic reactions appear to violate basic symmetry constraints,…
GBT Detects Aromatic Molecule Benzonitrile in the Taurus Molecular Cloud 1
Astronomers had a mystery on their hands. No matter where they looked, from inside the Milky Way to distant galaxies, they observed a puzzling glow…
Astronomers Use a Single Gravitational Wave Event to Measure the Age of the Universe
The direct detection of gravitational waves from at least five sources during the past two years offers spectacular confirmation of Einstein’s model of gravity and…
