Electromagnetic radiation astronomy is a research area focused on observing and interpreting astrophysical phenomena through their emission, absorption, and scattering of electromagnetic radiation across the entire spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays. It encompasses the development and use of ground-based and space-borne telescopes, detectors, and instrumentation optimized for specific wavelength ranges, along with calibration, data reduction, and spectral, temporal, and imaging analysis techniques. The field integrates radiative transfer, plasma physics, and atomic and molecular processes to infer physical conditions, kinematics, composition, and magnetic fields in cosmic sources, and underpins multiwavelength and multi-messenger studies of the universe.
The Very Large Array, the iconic field of radio antennas featured in the film "Contact" (inspired by Carl Sagan's novel), has a long and distinguished history of service. But after more than 45 years of studying the radio ...
Astronomy
Jun 3, 2026
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The largest magnetic map of the universe ever produced—five times larger than all previous efforts combined—marks the beginning of a new generation of research into intergalactic magnetism. Magnetic fields influence how galaxies ...
Astronomy
Jun 3, 2026
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Cornell astronomers are deploying a new instrument that grants them, for the first time, a better view of the universe's earliest galaxies, which can't be observed individually with traditional ground- or space-based telescopes.
Astronomy
May 12, 2026
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There may be an ultraheavy explanation for the mystery surrounding the origins of the highest-energy particles ever observed. Ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays are particles from space that strike Earth with energies far beyond ...
Astronomy
May 7, 2026
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When you're looking for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, it helps to know what you're looking for and to go about it in the most efficient way. But work so far has generally not done so, writes Benjamin Zuckerman, ...
The universe has a hidden structure, and a University of Virginia professor is mapping it in 3D, using 46 million galaxies and quasars and 19 million stars. Satya Gontcho A Gontcho, an assistant professor in the Department ...
Astronomy
Apr 21, 2026
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With the launch of Space Warps, a new citizen science project on the Zooniverse platform, you can now join in the search to find rare and elusive strong gravitational lenses in never-before-seen images captured by the European ...
Astronomy
Apr 21, 2026
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Using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), Chinese astronomers have inspected two nearby galactic globular clusters, namely NGC 6517 and NGC 7078. The study resulted in the discovery of six new ...
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have discovered a close pair of quasars, which is a result of a distant massive galaxy merger. The detection of the quasar pair was detailed in a ...
The absence of a signal could itself be a signal. This is the idea behind a new study published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, which aims to redefine how we search for dark matter, showing that it ...
Astronomy
Apr 9, 2026
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