radio astronomy
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Fastest-Growing Black Hole Is Eating a Sun Per Day
Hey Siri, play Super Massive Black Hole. Our Sun is about 330,000 times the mass of Earth, yet it is dwarfed by the black holes that lurk at the centers of galaxies. A team of astronomers recently found the fastest-growing of this group: a 17-billion solar mass black hole in the distant universe, which is…
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We’ve Underestimated Our Ability to Spot Alien Signals From Exoplanets
An encouraging new study has found that the interference from exoplanets—planets that orbit stars outside our solar system—has been overestimated in searches for extraterrestrial signals. The results from the study, released last week in The Astronomical Journal, mean that scientists can concentrate on finer frequency shifts, markedly improving the potential effectiveness of campaigns to sniff…
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Perplexing Pulsar ‘Switching’ Behaviour Finally Deciphered by Astronomers
A rapidly spinning dead star’s wacky fluctuations in brightness are due to the extreme environment surrounding the object, according to a team of astronomers who observed it. Pulsars are fast-spinning magnetic star remains that spew electromagnetic radiation. They’re sometimes called “cosmic lighthouses,” because the jets of light they reliably emit can be precisely timed to…
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Massive Black Holes Littered the Early Universe, Simulation Suggests
Since the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein were first detected in 2015, astrophysicists have been pondering the gravitational wave background — the cumulative undulations of these spacetime ripples as they cross the cosmos.