Do supermassive black holes merge to form binary systems?

At the center of most galaxies are black holes so massive—up to several billion times the mass of our sun—that they have earned the descriptor "supermassive." Compare this to your run-of-the-mill stellar-mass black hole, ...

New report sets course for future of European astronomy

The ASTRONET Science Vision and Infrastructure Roadmap 2022 to 2035 is the latest comprehensive roadmap produced by the ASTRONET network of European funding agencies and research organizations. The network includes the UK ...

Cosmic blast takes rest at last

Last year, the first detection of gravitational waves linked to a gamma-ray burst triggered a vast follow-up campaign with ground and space telescopes to study the aftermath of the neutron star merger that gave rise to the ...

Can cosmic collisions be predicted before they happen?

On August 17, 2017, about 70 telescopes collectively turned their gaze to a fiery collision between two dead stars that took place millions of light-years away. The telescopes watched the event unfold in a rainbow of wavelengths, ...

W. M. Keck Observatory achieves first light with NIRES

Astronomers at W. M. Keck Observatory have successfully met a major milestone after capturing the very first science data from Keck Observatory's newest instrument, the Caltech-built Near-Infrared Echellette Spectrometer ...

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