As comet 46P/Wirtanen neared Earth on December 2, astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) took a remarkably close look the innermost regions of the comet’s coma, the gaseous envelope around its nucleus. ALMA imaged the comet when it was approximately 16.5 million kilometers from Earth. At its closet on December...
Riccardo Giacconi, an astrophysicist who won the Nobel Prize for pioneering the study of the universe through the X-rays emitted by the most violent actors in the cosmos, including black holes, exploding stars and galumphing clouds of galaxies, died on Sunday in the La Jolla section of San Diego. He was 87. The National Academy of Sciences, of...
ALMA Campaign Provides Unprecedented Views of the Birth of Planets Astronomers have cataloged nearly 4,000 exoplanets in orbit around distant stars. Though the discovery of these newfound worlds has taught us much, there is still a great deal we do not know about the birth of planets and the precise cosmic recipes that spawn the wide array of...
The AUI Board of Trustees met in Arlington, VA on October 25-26, 2018. Following President Adam Cohen’s overview of AUI, and reports from the Board and Governance Committees, the Board elected Eric Wilcots and Christine Wilson to serve as the next Board Chair and Vice-Chair of the AUI Board of Trustees, and appointed new Trustees Frank G. Klotz,...