2012

In May, it was announced that the Square Kilometer Array ( SKA) — an ambitious network of thousands of radio antennas – would be based in both South Africa (in addition to neighboring countries) and Australia. Assuming funding is in place, construction on...

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: Lecture I | Tue Jun 26th - 11.00 a.m...

Listen to this Podcast 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. Listen to a discussion about stars that may have with...

CREDIT: NASA/Chandra X-ray observatory/Smithsonian Astronomical Observatory/Francesca Civano Harvard-Smithsonian astronomers have found a galaxy (within the outlined box) that contains a massive black hole that is being ejected at several million miles...

NASA/Associated Press - 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...

Learn about the upcoming transit of Venus on June 5 from Harvard Emeritus Professor Owen Gingerich featured in new York TIme Article. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/science/space/venuss-transit-between-…

The universe is a marvelously complex place, filled with galaxies and larger-scale structures that have evolved over its 13.7-billion-year history. Those began as small perturbations of matter that grew over time, like ripples in a pond, as the universe...

An artistic rendition of a nomad object wandering the interstellar medium. The object is intentionally blurry to represent uncertainty about whether or not it has an atmosphere. A nomadic object may be an icy body akin to an object found in the outer...

Scientists were able to observe the demise of a star and its digestion by a previously dormant supermassive black hole in real time. f a star passes too close to a black hole, tidal forces can rip it apart, and its constituent gases then swirl in toward...

The Tycho supernova remnant is the result of a Type Ia supernova explosion. The explosion was observed by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe in 1572. More than 400 years later, the ejecta from that explosion has expanded to fill a bubble 55 light-years across...