There was a report about a month ago that a Fast Radio Burst (FRB) produced a repeating signal. This is big news because we really don’t know what causes FRBs, and once they have ended it can be difficult to trace their source. But a repeating signal means we can pinpoint their origin and potentially figure out their root cause. It’s no wonder the astronomical community was excited…and skeptical. Most of the FRBs that have been discovered were in archival data – data from past surveys that were given a closer look. Only a few have been seen in real-time, so when...
If you ask someone what the craziest, most powerful, energetic, and enigmatic thing in the universe is, chances are they will say a black hole. After all, we know so little about them, we have never directly seen one, and we can see their influence across space and time. But there is apparently another notch on the crazy powerful cosmic object front. Like turning the volume knob to eleven, a binary system of supermassive black holes has been discovered in a nearby quasar. A quasar is an incredibly bright core of a distant galaxy, shining brighter than the entire galaxy...
I love data visualization. If I didn’t love astronomy and explosions so much, I would probably be in the art form of visualizing data in fascinating ways. Who knows? I may change my life’s work some day. A recent APOD takes the art to a new level. By looking at time sensitive measurements of Gamma Rays from an incredible active galactic nucleus (AGN), we can get an idea of how a gamma ray burst comes at us from so far away, and what the difference is between the usual activity and a true burst of radiation. Each circle represents a...
Have you ever heard of an object called ‘Hanny’s Voorwerp?’ It’s a thin wispy ghost-like blob at the edge of a Galaxy. It was discovered by Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel in 2007 as she was classifying galaxies as part of the Galaxy Zoo project. Since then, astronomers have been studying its origin, as it was the first of a brand new phenomenon in astronomy. This past week, a new data set of wispy trails at the edge of Galaxies have been released as part of a Hubble study by Bill Keel of the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. The new Hubble...
