All articles tagged with #radio astronomy
Astronomers using the VLBA tracked the quasar TXS 2005+403, 10 billion light-years away, as its radio waves were bent by turbulence in the Milky Way's ionized gas. The study finds persistent, patchy distortions rather than simple blur, providing a new probe of the Galaxy’s interstellar medium and informing models of star formation and cosmic-ray propagation.
Astronomers directly measured the instantaneous power of jets from the Cygnus X-1 black hole binary—nearly 10,000 suns—while jets travel at about 0.5c and bend under the donor star’s wind, based on 18 years of high-resolution radio observations; the real-time jet-power measurement improves understanding of black-hole feedback and its influence on galaxy-scale environments.
Astronomers released the largest, most detailed image of the Milky Way's center, created with ALMA's 66 antennas to map cold molecular gas and dust at millimeter wavelengths. The mosaic reveals intricate gas filaments and molecular fingerprints, offering new insight into how stars form in the extreme environment around the galactic center, including a mysterious millimeter ultra-broad line object (MUBLO) detected only by ALMA. The project will be complemented by JWST observations to place our Galaxy in broader cosmic context and to inform theories of solar-system formation.
In 1933, Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky investigated interference in long‑distance radio communications and detected a persistent, 23‑hour‑56‑minute hiss from a fixed region in space, tracing it to the Milky Way and revealing that stars emit radio waves—laying the groundwork for the field of radio astronomy.
Astronomers using the upgraded uGMRT and MeerKAT confirm a giant radio halo spanning 3.3 million light-years in the relatively quiet galaxy cluster RXCJ0232–4420, challenging the view that such halos only form in violent mergers. The halo shows a uniform spectral index around −1.1, extends across frequencies, and correlates with hot X-ray gas, with an eastern relic detected and the cluster in an intermediate dynamical state while preserving a cool core.
Researchers have mapped the Vela Supercluster, a massive galaxy assembly hidden behind the Milky Way’s dust in the Zone of Avoidance. Using SALT and the MeerKAT radio telescope, the structure—about 300 million light-years across and roughly 800 million light-years from Earth—contains the mass of ~30 quadrillion suns, making it one of the largest known local-universe structures. The discovery, ten years after its initial identification, helps refine models of cosmology and the distribution of matter in the universe, with future radio telescopes expected to yield even more detailed maps.
Astronomers mapped the Vela-Banzi supercluster behind the Milky Way, stretching about 300 million light-years across with at least 20 galaxy clusters and a mass around 30 quadrillion suns, located roughly 800 million light-years away in the Zone of Avoidance; two massive cores are converging, indicating ongoing growth. The map draws on some 65,000 distance measurements and about 8,000 redshifts (including ~2,000 from MeerKAT), refining our view of nearby cosmic structure and cosmological models.
Astronomers used 18 years of global radio observations to directly measure the power of jets from Cygnus X-1, a black hole–supergiant binary, finding the jets carry energy equivalent to about 10,000 suns and travel at ~150,000 km/s, with winds deflecting them by ~2 degrees. This instantaneous jet-power reading links accretion to ejection, confirms a long-standing 10% energy-into-jets assumption in galaxy-formation simulations, and provides a scalable anchor for calibrating jet power across black-hole masses as next-generation telescopes come online.
Astronomers observe a reborn supermassive black hole in galaxy J1007+3540 unleashing a colossal jet eruption—described as a cosmic volcano—that interacts with hot cluster gas to reshape jets and lobes across nearly a million light-years, highlighting episodic AGN activity and implications for galaxy evolution.
Astronomers observed a reborn supermassive black hole in galaxy J1007+3540, whose renewed jets after nearly 100 million years clash with the surrounding hot cluster gas, bending and compressing into structures spanning about a million light-years. LOFAR and uGMRT radio data reveal a bright inner jet inside older, faded lobes and a long faint tail shaped by the dense environment, marking a rare episodic AGN. This insight helps explain how black holes cycle on and off and how their jets sculpt their host galaxies, with plans for higher-resolution follow-up observations.
Astronomers spotted the fading radio afterglow of a gamma-ray burst that Earth never saw because its jet was not pointed toward us. Using the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope, they traced ASKAP J005512-255834 to a distant, star-forming galaxy and identified it as the most convincing orphan-afterglow candidate yet, offering a template for finding similar high-energy explosions when the initial blast is missed.
Scientists released the LOFAR DR3 dataset—the largest radio sky survey to date—mapping about 13.7 million radio-emitting objects across 88% of the northern sky, drawn from 18.6 petabytes of data processed with Europe’s supercomputers; the survey reveals extreme phenomena like black-hole jets and distant active galaxies, and demonstrates the massive data-handling required to stitch signals from 70,000 antennas, setting the stage for future SKA projects and widespread follow-up studies.
SETI researchers warn that solar storms and plasma turbulence around stars can broaden and weaken ultra-narrow radio signals from potential alien transmitters, making them harder to detect with traditional searches and prompting researchers to rethink observation strategies, including higher-frequency surveys; the finding explains, in part, why technosignature signals remain elusive while suggesting aliens might still be out there.
Astronomers using the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) detected the long‑lived radio afterglow of a powerful gamma‑ray burst that emitted little or no high‑energy light, revealing an orphan afterglow (ASKAP J005512-255834). The radio source brightened to about 10^32 watts of energy and faded over about 1,000 days, and lies in a distant, star‑forming galaxy ~1.7 billion light‑years away. This finding provides a clearer example of hidden GRB events and could help map the full gamma‑ray burst population, though an alternative explanation — a star torn apart by an intermediate‑mass black hole — remains possible.
Astronomers using the MeerKAT radio telescope spotted an extremely bright hydroxyl maser in the distant galaxy merger H-ATLAS J142935.3–002836, whose signal was amplified by an unrelated foreground galaxy acting as a gravitational lens, yielding the first gigamaser—about 100,000 times the luminosity of a star—and enabling new ways to probe cosmic evolution from billions of light-years away.