News
Mysterious Sagittarius A* -- The Supermassive Black Hole at Center of the Milky Way
The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, known as Sagittarius A*, has a mass of more than 3.7 million times that of our sun. It is so dense that nothing can escape its gravitational pull, not even light. Therefore, Sagittarius A* cannot be seen directly, but its influence on nearby stars is clearly visible, and provides a signature as to what is happening inside the black hole according to researchers at Northwestern University and UCLA, who are performing the most comprehensive study of Sagittarius A* to date. Their work has provided the best evidence yet that a supermassive black hole does indeed exist at the center of the Milky Way.
Magnetic Fields Sculpt Narrow Jets From Dying Star.
Molecules spewed outward from a dying star are confined into narrow jets by a tightly-wound magnetic field, according to astronomers who used the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) radio telescope to study an old star about 8,500 light-years from Earth. <b>NOTE: French, German, Italian, and Spanish translations follow...</b>
Hubble Captures First-ever Five-Image Gravitationally Lensed Quasar
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured the first-ever picture of a gravitationally lensed five star-like image of a single distant quasar. Although many examples of gravitational lensing have been observed, this "quintuple quasar" is the only case so far in which multiple quasar images are produced by an entire galaxy cluster acting as a gravitational lens.
GAIA Space-Based Observatory to Record a Billion Stars
GAIA will be the most accurate optical space-based observatory ever built. GAIA ’s measurement accuracy is so great that if it were on the Moon, it could measure the thumbnail of a person on Earth. Due for launch in 2011, GAIA will continuously scan the sky from a point in space located at about 1.6 million kilometres away from the Earth, in the direction opposite to the Sun.
Astronomy Day Fun for All
Everyday folks wowed by celestial wonders
Funding Member