Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have captured the first direct, high-resolution images of a magnetic field wrapped tightly around the outflow of gas streaming away from a forming star — evidence that solves a decades-old puzzle about how young stars sculpt the powerful jets that form them.
Recent News
A Trillion Mile Cosmic Stream of Gas Feeds GW Orionis
A team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), of which the U.S. National Science Foundation National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a partner, has captured a massive stream of gas—one trillion miles, or .2 light years long—feeding the young triple-star system GW Orionis.
NSF NRAO radio observations help rule out a relativistic jet in rare stellar explosion
Astronomers studying a rare stellar explosion first spotted as a brief burst of X-rays used radio observations to help show that the dying star did not produce the powerful jet often associated with gamma-ray bursts.
Scientists use Exotic Stars to Tune into Hum from Cosmic Symphony
Credit: A. Simonnet (NANOGrav)
For the last 15 years, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) Physics Frontiers Center has been using radio telescopes supported by the National Science Foundation— including those operated by NSF’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory— to turn a suite of millisecond pulsars into a galaxy-scale gravitational-wave detector. Millisecond pulsars are remnants of extinguished massive stars; as they spin hundreds of times each second, their “lighthouse-like” radio beams are seen as highly regular pulses. Gravitational waves stretch and squeeze space and time in a characteristic pattern, causing changes in the intervals between these pulses that are correlated across all the pulsars being observed. These correlated changes are the specific signal that NANOGrav has been working to detect.
NANOGrav’s most recent dataset offers compelling evidence for gravitational waves with oscillations of years to decades. These waves are thought to arise from orbiting pairs of the most massive black holes throughout the Universe: billions of times more massive than the Sun, with sizes larger than the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Future studies of this signal will enable us to view the gravitational-wave universe through a new window, providing insight into titanic black holes merging in the hearts of distant galaxies and potentially other exotic sources of low-frequency gravitational waves.
Read the full press release from NANOGrav.
A public event discussing the results will take place on Thursday, June 29, 2023 at 1pm Eastern Time on YouTube Live.
This news article was originally published on the NRAO website on June 28, 2023.
Recent News
Twisted Physics: Astronomers Solve 30-Year-Old Stellar Mystery
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have captured the first direct, high-resolution images of a magnetic field wrapped tightly around the outflow of gas streaming away from a forming star — evidence that solves a decades-old puzzle about how young stars sculpt the powerful jets that form them.
A Trillion Mile Cosmic Stream of Gas Feeds GW Orionis
A team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), of which the U.S. National Science Foundation National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a partner, has captured a massive stream of gas—one trillion miles, or .2 light years long—feeding the young triple-star system GW Orionis.
NSF NRAO radio observations help rule out a relativistic jet in rare stellar explosion
Astronomers studying a rare stellar explosion first spotted as a brief burst of X-rays used radio observations to help show that the dying star did not produce the powerful jet often associated with gamma-ray bursts.