Space Telescopes, Part I: Optical.

 

(Credit: NASA/ESA/S. Gallagher/J. English).

 

 Hickson Group 31 of galaxies as imaged by Hubble.
   This weeks’ expose will kick off our four part series on orbiting space telescopes. For starters, we’ll begin with the most familiar; the optical wavelength. True, we as humans are biased towards this narrow band of the spectrum; we love to see pretty [...]

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 [...]

11.10.09: Zooming in on Blazars.

Astronomers have recently utilized an enormous radio telescope to examine some of the most exotic objects in the universe; active galactic nuclei. Sometimes called “Blazars”, these distant galaxies are spewing huge jets of particles at amazing relativistic speeds. These emit immense energy across the electromagnetic spectrum. NASA’s Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope has identified [...]