Brian Koberlein
Two Supermassive Black Holes on the Verge of a Merger
Researchers have been keeping an eye on the center of a galaxy located about a billion light-years away. Every few…
Astronomers Map the Shape of a Black Hole's Corona for the First Time
The Sun is surrounded by the corona, a region of superheated gas above the surface that can be millions of…
Astronomers Defy the Zone of Avoidance to Find Hundreds of New Galaxies
The Zone of Avoidance is a region of the sky that's obscured by the disk of the Milky Way. The…
How Webb Stays in Focus
JWST's primary mirror consists of 18 individual segments, each of which can be moved on 6 different axes of freedom.…
Using Light Echoes to Find Black Holes
The speed of light gives astronomers a special trick when examining the tangled-up gravitational well around a black hole. Researchers…
An Explanation for Rogue Planets. They Were Eroded Down by Hot Stars
WST recently turned up hundreds of free-floating rogue planets in the Orion Nebula, 42 in binary configurations. How two Jupiter-mass…
You Can Build a Home Radio Telescope to Detect Clouds of Hydrogen in the Milky Way
If I ask you to picture a radio telescope, you probably imagine a large dish pointing to the sky, or…
We Understand Rotating Black Holes Even Less Than We Thought
The theory of black holes has several mathematical oddities. Recent research shows our understanding of rotating black holes might not…
How Many Additional Exoplanets are in Known Systems?
NASA's TESS mission has turned up thousands of exoplanet candidates in almost as many different star systems. But if one…
Another Way to Extract Energy From Black Holes?
Black holes are incredible powerhouses, but they might generate even more energy thanks to an unusual effect known as frame…