23.06.10- Swift Spies Black Holes Feeding on Galaxy Mergers.

 
   NASA’s orbiting Swift telescope is in the news again, this time providing a key link between energetic nuclei and active galaxy mergers. The findings come after a survey conducted since 2004 by Swifts’ Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) of active galactic nuclei. A small percentage of these (less than 1 %) are extremely active, emitting 10 [...]

23.05.10-Are Black Holes the Key to Dark Matter?

An artist’s conception of a gas torus surrounding a super-massive black hole. (Credit: V.Beckmann/NASA).
   For the past few decades, astronomers have been hot on the trail of the “missing” part of our universe. About 23 percent of our universe appears to be comprised of dark matter, non-luminous material that gives itself away only via gravitational interaction. [...]

27.03.10- Modeling Black Holes.

 
   Researchers are calling in the big guns in the quest to understanding black holes. Specifically, scientists at the Rochester Institute of Technology are using time on some of the fastest and most powerful computers in use to model and predict the activity of super massive black holes. But these aren’t your ordinary off the [...]

20.03.10: Spying a Black Hole Welterweight.

  
   Astronomers now have observational evidence for a missing class of black hole. Stellar mass black holes, those up to about 10 solar masses, are well known as the remnants of supernovae. Likewise for supermassive black holes of 10,000 solar masses or greater known to reside in the hearts of galaxies like our own. The [...]

02.11.09:The Low-Down on LOFAR.

European radio astronomers at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) have recently opened a potentially new window on the universe with an exotic new instrument. Dubbed LOFAR, or the Low Frequency Array, this unique instrument will examine the sky at extremely low radio frequencies, with a low band of 30 to 78 MHz and [...]

June 2009 News & Notes.

Blast! (Credit: Marc Halpern/the Blast Collaboration).
BLAST takes off! Recently, scientists got a look into some of the earliest moments of the universe. BLAST, the Balloon borne Large Aperture, Sub-millimeter Telescope, is an unlikely looking instrument in an unlikely place. Carried on a long tether and based in the Antarctic, BLAST can stay aloft for weeks [...]

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