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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…