All articles tagged with #vla
New radio observations from ALMA and the VLA confirm that Betelgeuse’s long-term dimming cycle is caused by a companion star, Siwarha, orbiting within its extended atmosphere. The data shows the star’s atmosphere has recovered from the 2019-2020 Great Dimming, while Siwarha’s gravitational wake distorts the star’s shape, explaining its variable brightness.
New radio observations confirm Betelgeuse’s atmosphere has recovered from the 2019-2020 Great Dimming. Data from the VLA and ALMA reveal the star’s shape is distorted by its companion, Siwarha, which orbits within the red supergiant’s extended atmosphere.
Using combined 21 cm HI observations from the VLA and FAST, researchers produced the sharpest radio maps of neutral hydrogen around the Orion Nebula, revealing giant expanding shells, cavities, and a four-light-year protrusion inside a second cavity. The structures imply the region was sculpted by multiple generations of massive stars rather than a single bubble, and the HI mass is revised down from ~1000 to ~100 solar masses. Published in Astronomy & Astrophysics as part of the NeAtHood project, the findings challenge simple star-formation models and showcase the power of modern radio interferometers, hinting at more hidden structure to come.
Scientists have detected a giant cyclone swirling around the north pole of Uranus using radio telescopes like the Very Large Array (VLA). The cyclone is similar to the polar cyclones observed by the Cassini mission at Saturn. With this discovery, cyclones or anti-cyclones have now been identified at the poles on every planet in our solar system that has an atmosphere. Uranus's north pole is now in springtime, and astronomers hope to see even more changes in its atmosphere as it continues into summer.
The SETI Institute, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and the Breakthrough Listen Initiative have teamed up for a new project called COSMIC, which uses the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to search for signals from other galactic civilizations. The VLA is collecting data that scientists will analyze for the type of emissions that only artificial transmitters make, signals that would betray the existence of a technically accomplished society. The new processing system for SETI is dubbed “COSMIC” – the Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster – and is spearheaded by the SETI Institute, in collaboration with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and the Breakthrough Listen Initiative.