From “Detection of the Gravitational Lens Magnifying a Type Ia Supernova“ The supernova of PS1-10afx was seen in 2010 and extremely bright for its class and location ~9 billion light years away. New research suggests that a galaxy in front of it, invisible in the bright light, had acted as a giant magnifying lens for the light on its way to Earth. This finding, when … Continue reading A distant galaxy acts as a giant magnifying glass
Pulsars have been nicknamed “cosmic lighthouses” after the narrow beams of radio light they sweep through space. For astronomers, one newly-discovered pulsar is casting light on an unexplored and mysterious region of the cosmic “ocean”: the immediate neighborhood of the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way galaxy’s heart. Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit regular pulses of radio waves. The pulsar in … Continue reading Shedding Light on Supermassive Black Holes with Pulsars
We may know that the universe began with a Big Bang, but until yesterday, we had no direct evidence for the drastic expansion the universe is thought to have undergone in the moments after its birth. This “inflationary” model has grown from a speculation in 1979 into the best available explanation of how the universe’s infant moments (less than a trillionths of a trillionth of a second) formed crucial aspects of our universe today. Continue reading Inflation of the Universe!
Presented by Katherine Rosenfeld, Laura Schaefer, Anjali Tripathi For millennia, our understanding of Earth came from our own experiences on the planet. Today, with the ability to observe other planets in the Solar System and planets around other stars, we have a better sense of our place in the Universe and how the Earth formed and evolved. This evening’s lecture will begin with current knowledge … Continue reading Earth Formation: The making of planet earth
Harvard University Professor Dr. Andrew Knoll speaks on the scientific intrigue of Mars, his involvement with the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, and the future of Mars investigation Mars. The Red Planet, the fourth from our sun. Named after the Roman god of war, Mars has intrigued humans for thousands of years. The peoples of ancient China, Egypt, and Babylonia studied it in detail, using only … Continue reading One Man on Mars: An interview with Dr. Andrew Knoll
In 2018, NASA plans to launch the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) [] to replace the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been in orbit since 1990 []. The Hubble has taken images of galaxies in all stages pay someone to write my paper of evolution, helped establish a better estimate of the age of the universe and contributed to the discovery of dark energy. Like … Continue reading The James Webb Space Telescope: Studying the formation of the first galaxies
Image credit: NASA Manned missions to Mars have captured the public imagination since the first sci-fi novels in the late 1800s allowed people to imagine what it might be like to explore the Red planet. But it is only in the past few years that such an endeavor has been seriously discussed by NASA and by private sector organizations. Just this year, two separate private … Continue reading Can Humans Play Red Rover?
Since the first two-hour excursion into space by Yuri Gagarin in 1961, the lure of manned space travel has proved irresistible to scientists, entrepreneurs, and entertainers alike. Today, as technology becomes more capable of enabling manned travel to Mars and Hollywood’s imagination runs wild with notions of humanity’s spaceflight-steeped future (with recent blockbusters like Star Trek, Prometheus, Star Wars, and even Wall-E), many fallacies about … Continue reading The human body in space: Distinguishing fact from fiction
Revolving around the sun, in an orbit similar to our own, is NASA’s Kepler Spacecraft. Launched in 2009 and named after the Renaissance computer science homework help astronomer Johannes Kepler, Kepler’s mission, like that of many ground-based telescopes, is to survey a portion of the Milky Way and discover exoplanets – planets outside of our solar system. Ultimately we hope to find a habitable world. … Continue reading Exoplanets
As our closest astronomical neighbors, the planets have been subjects of keen observation by astronomers for over three millennia. The twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, built and launched in the 1970s, flew by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and provided a wealth of data and photographs in the 1980s. But far beyond even the most distant planet lies an invisible boundary at the edge … Continue reading The Voyager Probes: A 35 Year Galactic Road Trip