Mysterious bursts of radio waves detected on Earth may be coming from magnetars, say the scientists who first detected them. The international team of astronomers behind the discovery, writing in the journal Science, explain that the characteristics of the bursts indicate they come from sources billions of light years distant. “A single burst of radio […]
The world’s most complex ground-based astronomy observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in northern Chile, has captured its first image – a pair of colliding galaxies. The detailed view of the merging Antennae Galaxies confirms that the ALMA array – which is still only one-third complete – will eventually allow astronomers to explore some […]
A new class of pulsar detected by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is solving the mystery of previously unidentified radio-quiet gamma-ray sources. The report in Science describes 16 pulsars discovered by Fermi based only on their emissions of high-energy gamma rays. Previously, most of the 1,800 known pulsars were found through their periodic radio emissions. […]
Physicists using the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico have uncovered radio interpulses from the Crab Nebula pulsar that feature never-before-seen radio emission spectra. The discovery has led scientists to speculate that this could be the first cosmic object with a third magnetic pole. “We never see the strange frequency structure in the main pulse and […]
In an article appearing on the Astrophysical Journal Letters website, astrophysicists at Stanford report spotting a black hole that’s more than 10 billion times the mass of our sun. Its so far away that the researchers think it formed when the first stars and galaxies began to light up and it may provide a window […]
