Imaging a Multiple Star
Multiple stars - binaries, triplets, or perhaps more stars, that orbit each other - are unique laboratories into the interactions between stars and their early environments. Young stars ...
On the Road: SI Secretary Wayne Clough Visits Arizona (Part II)
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Astronomers love Tucson and Tucson loves astronomers. The city is ringed by craggy mountain peaks topped by observatories, including Kitts Peak, Mt. Hopkins, and Mt. Graham. Astronomers s...
Far-Future Astronomers Could Still Deduce the Big Bang
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Cambridge, MA
One trillion years from now, an alien astronomer in our galaxy will have a difficult time figuring out how the universe began. They won't have the evidence that we enjoy to...
Newly Merged Black Hole Eagerly Shreds Stars
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Cambridge, MA
A galaxy's core is a busy place, crowded with stars swarming around an enormous black hole. When galaxies collide, it gets even messier as the two black holes spiral toward...
The Most Massive Distant Object Known
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Galaxies often occur in groups. Our own Milky Way galaxy, for example, and its local neighborhood with about fifty galaxies are at the edge of the Virgo Cluster, a collection of somewher...
Two Dying Stars Reborn as One
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Cambridge, MA
White dwarfs are dead stars that pack a Sun's-worth of matter into an Earth-sized ball. Astronomers have just discovered an amazing pair of white dwarfs whirling around eac...
NSF Will Transfer Prototype Radio Antenna to Center for Astrophysics
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Cambridge, MA
The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has been selected by the National Science Foundation as recipient of a 12-meter (39-foot) radio antenna designed for s...
Explaining the Mystery of the Missing Sunspots
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Sunspots have been observed for about four centuries, since they were first reported by Galileo. Appearing in roughly eleven-year cycles of activity, sunspots are regions of strong and c...
On the Road: SI Secretary Wayne Clough Visits Arizona
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The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory is a far-flung enterprise. Having grown beyond the capacity of its original location on the National Mall, in 1955 the Observatory moved its hea...
Magnetic Fields in Interstellar Clouds
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Magnetic fields play an important role in theformation and evolution of stars, as they stretch around a hot medium like a rubber band and help to determine the flow of material onto or
aw...