Measuring the structure of a giant solar flare

The sun's corona, its hot outermost layer, has a temperature of over a million degrees Kelvin, and produces a wind of charged particles, about one-millionth of the moon's mass is ejected each year. Transient events have been ...

Measuring the spin of a black hole

A black hole, at least in our current understanding, is characterized by having "no hair," that is, it is so simple that it can be completely described by just three parameters, its mass, its spin and its electric charge. ...

A new catalog of infrared dark clouds

Infrared dark clouds (IRDCs) are dark patches of cold dust and gas seen in the sky against the bright diffuse infrared glow of warm dust in our galaxy. These IRDCs, massive and rich in molecules, are natural sites for star ...

Galactic star formation and supermassive black hole masses

Astronomers studying how star formation evolved over cosmic time have discovered that quiescent galaxies (galaxies that are currently not making many new stars) frequently have active galactic nuclei. These AGN accrete material ...

Scientists shed light on growth of black holes

Scientists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and the Black Hole Initiative (BHI), have shed light on how black holes grow over time by developing a new model to predict if growth by accretion or by mergers ...

K2-25: An eccentric hot Neptune with the mass of seven Earths

Of the roughly 4,300 exoplanets confirmed to date, about ten percent of them are classified as "hot Jupiters." These are planets with masses between about 0.4 and 12 Jupiter-masses and orbital periods less than about 110 ...

VLASS: A survey of the radio sky

Technological advances in recent years have increased the sensitivity of radio interferometers like the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to the radio emission from astronomical sources in their continuum (not only in ...

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