Using the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, a team from Universities Space Research Association (USRA) and other institutions today announced today at the American Astronomical Society’s winterAAS meeting that mysterious bursts of radio emission, called Fast Radio Bursts (FRB), may be coming from near a giant black hole. Read More
Distance is one of the most challenging properties to measure in astronomy – it is bootstrapped from nearby objects like the Sun and planets all the way out to galaxies and quasars. The Pleiades, a nearby star cluster, had served as a cornerstone for astronomical distance derivations and set the scale for other clusters.
Until this year, astronomers have only been able to indirectly determine the presence of gravitational waves -- tiny, wave-like shifts of space and time -- through the measurements of decaying orbits of neutron stars. In January 2016, the LIGO collaboration announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves from a system of black holes orbiting and colliding together. Read More