Space and astronomy news
If I ask you to picture a radio telescope, you probably imagine a large dish pointing to the sky, or even an array of dish antennas such as the Very Large Array. What you likely don’t imagine is something that resembles a TV dish in your neighbor’s backyard. With modern electronics, it is relatively easy …
The Hubble Space Telescope was carried to space inside the space shuttle Discovery and then released into low-Earth orbit. The James Webb Space Telescope was squeezed inside the nose cone of an Ariane 5 rocket and then launched. It deployed its mirror and shade on its way to its home at the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange …
Continue reading “A Space Walking Robot Could Build a Giant Telescope in Space”
Unistellar’s new Odyssey Pro Telescope offers access to deep-sky astrophotography, in a small portable package.
Ground-based interferometry on Earth has proven to be a successful method for conducting science by combining light from several telescopes into acting like a single large telescope. But how can a ultraviolet (UV)/optical interferometer telescope on the Moon deliver enhanced science, and can the Artemis missions help make this a reality? This is what a …
Continue reading “Artemis Missions Could Put the most Powerful imaging Telescope on the Moon”
Three amazing recent asteroid finds show what’s possible in terms of astronomy online.
Ask most people what a galaxy is made up of, and they’ll say it’s made of stars. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, hosts between about 100 to 300 billion stars, and we can see thousands of them with our unaided eyes. But most of a galaxy’s mass is actually gas, and the extent of …
Continue reading “The True Size of Galaxies is Much Larger Than We Thought”
In the contemporary Universe, massive galaxies are plentiful. But the Universe wasn’t always like this. Astronomers think that galaxies grew large through mergers, so what we see in space is the result of billions of years of galaxies merging. When galaxies merge, the merger can feed large quantities of gas into their centers, sometimes creating …
Continue reading “This Ancient Galaxy Merger Will Produce a very Luminous Quasar”
Want a clear view of a supermassive black hole’s environment? It’s an incredible observational challenge. The extreme gravity bends light as it passes through and blurs the details of the event horizon, the region closest to the black hole. Astronomers using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) just conducted test observations aimed at “deblurring” that view.
Can a kilometer-scale telescope help conduct more efficient science, and specifically for the field of optical interferometry? This is what a recently submitted study hopes to address as a pair of researchers propose the Big Fringe Telescope (BFT), which is slated to comprise 16 telescopes 0.5-meter in diameter and will be equivalent to a telescope …
The prospect of actually resolving the event horizon of black holes feels like the stuff of science fiction yet it is a reality. Already the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has resolved the horizon of the black holes at the centre of the Milky Way and M87. A team of astronomers are now looking to the …
Continue reading “Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope To Unlock Mysteries of Black Holes”