Avi Loeb will deliver a series of four lectures as the recipient of the 2012 Galileo Chair ("Cattedra Galileiana") at Scoula Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. The lecture titles and times (in Italy) are as follows:
Listen to this Pocast from Scientific American. How big can a star get? Based on observations, astronomers think there's a limit of about 150 times the mass of the sun for the vast majority of stars.
Harvard-Smithsonian astronmers have found a galaxy (within the outlined box) that contains a massive black hole that is being ejected at several million miles per hour. Researchers used a combination of images from telescopes to narrow their ideas about what is happening in this galaxy, supporting the ejected black hole theory. The top image shows a single source of X-rays, indicating that there is a single black hole in this galaxy moving away from the star cluster at the center of the galaxy.
This illustration released by NASA depicts a view of the night sky just before the predicted merger between our Milky Way galaxy, left, and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy. About 3.75 billion years from now, Andromeda’s disk fills the field of view and its gravity begins to create tidal distortions in the Milky Way. The view is inspired by dynamical computer modeling of the future collision between the two
