The Rotation of Venus
Venus is covered in a thick layer of clouds, one reason that it appears so bright in the sky. Ancient astronomers had a good idea of what (since Copernicus) we know as its orbital period;...
The Nature of Obscured Active Galactic Nuclei
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Most galaxies host a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at their nucleus, one whose mass exceeds a million solar-masses. When material actively accretes onto the SMBH, associated processes ca...
Scientists Observe Year-long Plateaus in Decline of Type Ia Supernova Light Curves
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Cambridge, MA -
Scientists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have announced the discovery that, contrary to previously accepted knowledge, Type Ia supernovae exp...
The Hot X-Ray Gas in Giant Elliptical Galaxies
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The oldest known large galactic structures in the universe are giant elliptical galaxies. Unlike our Milky Way and other spiral galaxies, elliptical galaxies have no spiral arms and littl...
Heating the Solar Corona
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The hot outer layer of the sun, the corona, has a temperature of over a million degrees Kelvin, much more than the surface temperature of the Sun which is only about 5500 degrees Kelvin. ...
Announcement of the Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope Design Program
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Cambridge, MA -
The National Science Foundation has just announced the award of a $12.7M grant to architect and design a next-generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT) to carry out a pr...
Bright Galaxy Clusters in the Era of Peak Star Formation
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Galaxies actively engaged in making stars produce many hot massive stars that emit copious amounts of uv radiation. The neutral hydrogen gas in these galaxies (or in the intervening inter...
The Galaxy Cluster Abell 959
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Most galaxies lie in clusters containing from a few to thousands of objects. Our Milky Way, for example, belongs to the Local Group, a cluster of about fifty galaxies whose other large me...
Photosynthesis on Habitable Planets Around Low-Mass Stars
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Life on Earth is dominated by photosynthesis, the process by which green plants and some organisms use sunlight at visible wavelengths to synthesize carbon-based nutrients from carbon dio...
EHT Collaboration Awarded the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics
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Cambridge, MA -
Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration Director Shep Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian will accept the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundame...