Submillimeter Eagle Eyes on Mauna Kea
Cambridge, MA
Colliding Galaxies in the Early Universe
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The universe contains many fabulously luminous galaxies, some of them more than a thousand times brighter than our own Milky Way. Most of them are practically invisible at optical wavele...
Dusty Globules
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New stars tend to form with disks of gas and dust around them. After a few hundred thousand years or so, the intense ultraviolet radiation from the most massive of these stars has expell...
Studying a Young Solar System
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When the first infrared cosmic survey satellite, IRAS, looked at the nearby star Epsilon Eridani in 1984, it found that the star emitted a large excess of cool infrared radiation. This st...
Hot Water
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In 1998, a NASA team led by SAO astronomers launched a space mission to study water in space (and some other key molecules and atoms as well). The satellite, the Submillimeter Wave Astron...
Solar System's Young Twin Has Two Asteroid Belts
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Cambridge, MA
Astronomers have discovered that the nearby star Epsilon Eridani has two rocky asteroid belts and an outer icy ring, making it a triple-ring system. The inner asteroid belt...
X-ray Jets
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The longest known collimated structures in the universe are the narrow jets that emanate from vicinity of powerful black holes in certain types of galactic nuclei. These narrow beams ca...
Colossal Black Holes Common in the Early Universe
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Cambridge, MA
Astronomers think that many - perhaps all - galaxies in the universe contain massive black holes at their centers. New observations with the Submillimeter Array now suggest...
Double Jets in Young Binary Stars
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Most stars the size of the sun or larger (in mass) are part of multiple stellar systems in which two or even three stars orbit around one another. This tendency presumably reflects the co...
The Double Nuclei of a Pair of Colliding Galaxies
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The galaxy Arp 220 is actually two galaxies that have been caught in the act of merging. Astronomers think that many galaxies, including our own Milky Way, have undergone similar collisio...