An international team of astronomers, including scientists at the U.S. National Science Foundation National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NSF NRAO) have discovered a powerful, rotating, magnetic wind that they believe is helping a galaxy’s central supermassive black hole to grow.
Astronomers recently used two very different, and very powerful, telescopes to discover twin disks—and twin parallel jets—erupting from young stars in a multiple star system. This discovery was unexpected, and unprecedented, given the age, size, and chemical makeup of the stars, disks, and jets.
Astronomers using the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope targeted the Smith Cloud for their observations, however, the Milky Way’s inner galaxy obscured their view. While these scientists didn’t find what they were originally looking for, they did observe something new about this part of our home galaxy. This inner part of the Milky Way appears to be half the size of the outer part!
At the 244th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), researchers unveiled groundbreaking findings from a pioneering high-angular resolution program that sheds new light on the process of planet formation in circumstellar disks around young stars in binary systems.