Astronomers have made the most precise measurements yet of the motions of stars around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. These results, obtained with the help of the Gemini North telescope, show that 99.9% of the mass contained at the very center of the galaxy is due to the black hole, and only 0.1% could include stars, smaller black holes, interstellar dust and gas, or dark matter.
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AURA is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Željko Ivezić as the next Director of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Construction Project
commissioning phase (OCP). Starting on December 6, 2021, and weather permitting, DKIST will perform first science observations, implementing observing experiments submitted by community members during the first proposal call.
From its vantage point high above Earth’s atmosphere, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has completed this year’s grand tour of the outer solar system – returning crisp images that complement current and past observations from interplanetary spacecraft. This is the realm of the giant planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune – extending as far as 30 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.
More than half of the Sun-like star systems surveyed in the Milky Way harbor a mysterious type of planet unlike any in our own solar system.
The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) fully supports the scientific vision of Pathways to Discovery in Astronomy and
Rocky debris, the pieces of a former rocky planet that has broken up, spiral inward toward a white dwarf in this illustration. Studying the atmospheres of white dwarfs that have been “polluted” by such debris, a NOIRLab astronomer and a geologist have identified exotic rock types that do not exist in our Solar System. The […]
AURA in Chile is now accepting applications for the 2021 AURA Padre Picetti Award, open to all science teachers in Chile!
to create an image of the area directly surrounding the supermassive black hole at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy.
After nearly a decade of work, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has delivered the last of the six filters built for use with Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time Camera (LSSTCam). The filters have now all arrived at the US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, where they will be integrated into the camera.
The Satellite Constellations 2 (SATCON2) workshop, held 12–16 July 2021, brought together more than 350 astronomers, satellite operators, dark-sky advocates, policy experts, and other stakeholders from 40 countries to discuss how to implement the strategies and recommendations emerging from the 2020 SATCON1 workshop to minimize the negative impacts of satellite constellations on astronomy and the night sky.
A new set of solar oscillations with specific long-duration properties have recently been discovered by a group of scientists led by Laurent Gizon of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (Germany) with a contribution from NSO scientists and observations.
Researchers analyzing Hubble’s regular “storm reports” found that the average wind speed just within the boundaries of the storm, known as a high-speed ring, has increased by up to 8 percent from 2009 to 2020.
The denizens of the Fornax galaxy cluster populate this image from the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope, located in Chile at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. The irregular galaxy lurking in the bottom left corner of this Dark Energy Survey image is NGC 1427A, and its headlong plunge into the heart of the Fornax Cluster over millions of years will eventually result in the galaxy’s disruption.
National Science Foundation (NSF) recently convened an external review panel for the Final Construction Review (FCR) of the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope Project.
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