What happens inside a black hole stays inside a black hole, but what happens inside a black hole’s “sphere of influence” – the innermost region of a galaxy where a black hole’s gravity is the dominant force – is of intense interest to astronomers and can help determine the mass of a black hole as well as its impact on its galactic neighborhood....
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have made the first-ever observations of a circumplanetary disk, the planet-girding belt of dust and gas that astronomers strongly theorize controls the formation of planets and gives rise to an entire system of moons, like those found around Jupiter. This never-before-seen...
Summary: Using the both ALMA and the VLT, astronomers have imaged the cold, rock-strewn rings encircling the planet Uranus. Rather than observing the reflected sunlight from these rings, ALMA and the VLT imaged the millimeter and mid-infrared “glow” naturally emitted by the frigidly cold particles of the rings themselves. The rings of Uranus are...
How a Telescope Made Mostly of Nothing Became Astronomy’s ‘Killer App’ Astronomers have captured the first direct visual evidence of a black hole at the center of Messier 87 (M87), a giant elliptical galaxy 55 million light-years from Earth. This unprecedented observation was made possible by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an array of eight...