Infrared Dark Clouds Cataloged Across the Cosmos
Infrared dark clouds (IRDCs) are dark patches of cold dust and gas seen in the sky against the bright diffuse infrared glow of warm dust…
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics News
Parallax Microlensing Free-Floating Stars in the Milky Way’s Bulge
The path of a light beam is bent by the presence of mass, as explained by General Relativity. A massive body can therefore act like…
Colossal Dark Matter Halos Surround Massive Galaxies
About eighty-five percent of the matter in the universe is in the form of dark matter, whose nature remains a mystery, and the rest is…
Path to Razor-Sharp Black Hole Images Discovered – Striking and Intricate Substructure
Last April, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) sparked international excitement when it unveiled the first image of a black hole. Today, a team of researchers…
Record-Breaking, Gargantuan Black Hole Eruption – Biggest Explosion Seen in the Universe
The biggest explosion seen in the universe has been found. This record-breaking, gargantuan eruption came from a black hole in a distant galaxy cluster hundreds…
The Cosmic Confusion of the Microwave Background in the Search for B-Mode Polarization
Roughly 380,000 years after the big bang, about 13.7 billion years ago, matter (mostly hydrogen) cooled enough for neutral atoms to form, and light was…
First Results From the Dark Energy Survey: Relationship Between Mass and Light Around Cosmic Voids
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) program uses the patterns of cosmic structure as seen in the spatial distribution of hundreds of millions of galaxies to…
Blazar Multiwavelength Variability Explained Using a Geometrical Model for the Rapidly Moving Jets
Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies that are accreting material. These AGN emit jets of charged particles that…
The Rotation of Venus – Accuracy Critical for Future Lander Missions
Venus is covered in a thick layer of clouds, which is one reason why it appears so bright in the sky. Ancient astronomers had a…
Massive Galaxy Cluster Abell 959 Is 3,000 Times the Mass of Milky-Way
Most galaxies lie in clusters containing from a few to thousands of objects. Our Milky Way, for example, belongs to the Local Group, a cluster…
Spectroscopic Survey Reveals the Nature of Obscured Active Galactic Nuclei
Most galaxies host a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at their nucleus, one whose mass exceeds a million solar-masses. When material actively accretes onto the SMBH,…
Merging Galaxies Spotted by Hubble Space Telescope
Over thirty years ago, the Infrared Astronomy Satellite discovered that the universe contained many extremely luminous galaxies, some more than a thousand times brighter than…
Scientists Update HITRAN to Help Model Exoplanet Atmospheres
All atoms and molecules emit distinctive spectral lines across the spectrum, the details of which depend on the internal structures of the species (for example,…
Astronomers Pit Einstein Against Newton to Determine the Mass of KOI-3278
A team of astronomers led by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have updated and confirmed self-lensing binary star KOI-3278’s companion to be a white dwarf…
Astronomers Confirm the Low Density of Kepler Exoplanets
The Kepler mission and its extension, called K2, discovered thousands of exoplanets. It detected them using the transit technique, measuring the dip in light intensity…
Martian Dust Storms Can Regenerate and Sustain Themselves
Dust is a critical component in the Martian atmosphere. It influences the atmosphere’s circulation by heating or cooling it and is in turn redistributed around…
Scientists Trace Co-Evolution of Galaxies and Supermassive Black Holes
The formation and growth of galaxies in the early universe is a key research topic for future giant telescopes like the Giant Magellan Telescope and…
Scientists Reveal Massive Collision in the Milky Way’s Past
Our Milky Way galaxy has probably collided or otherwise interacted with other galaxies during its lifetime; such interactions are common cosmic occurrences. Astronomers can deduce…
