Comparing orbits of pulsar and its companion to our solar system (Credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF).

News Releases

5/15/08: Weird Stellar Pair Puzzles Scientists. Astronomers have discovered a speedy spinning pulsar in an elongated orbit around an apparent Sun-like star, a combination never seen before, and one that has them puzzled about how the strange system developed...

5/14/08: Youngest Stellar Explosion in Our Galaxy Discovered. Astronomers have found the remains of the youngest supernova, or exploded star, in our Galaxy. The supernova remnant, hidden behind a thick veil of gas and dust, was revealed by the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) and NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory, which could see through the murk...

5/7/08: Distinguished Astronomer Awarded Jansky Lectureship. Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) have awarded the 2008 Karl G. Jansky Lectureship to Dr. Arthur M. Wolfe of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD)...

4/23/08: Radio Telescope Reveals Secrets of Massive Black Hole. At the cores of many galaxies, supermassive black holes expel powerful jets of particles at nearly the speed of light. Just how they perform this feat has long been one of the mysteries of astrophysics... Watch Video

2/18/08: Very Large Array Retooling for 21st-Century Science. An international project to make the world's most productive ground-based telescope 10 times more capable has reached its halfway mark and is on schedule to provide astronomers with an extremely powerful new tool for exploring the Universe...

2/15/08: World-Wide Effort Bringing ALMA Telescope Into Reality. In the thin, dry air of northern Chile's Atacama Desert, at an altitude of 16,500 feet, an amazing new telescope system is taking shape, on schedule to provide the world's astronomers with unprecedented views of the origins of stars, galaxies, and planets...

1/11/08: Massive Gas Cloud Speeding Toward Collision With Milky Way. A giant cloud of hydrogen gas is speeding toward a collision with our Milky Way Galaxy, and when it hits -- in less than 40 million years -- it may set off a spectacular burst of stellar fireworks...

1/10/08: New VLA Images Unlocking Galactic Mysteries. Astronomers have produced a scientific gold mine of detailed, high-quality images of nearby galaxies that is yielding important new insights into many aspects of galaxies, including their complex structures, how they form stars, the motions of gas in the galaxies, the relationship of "normal" matter to unseen "dark matter," and many others...

1/10/08: New Hydrogen Clouds in the M81 Group of Galaxies. A composite radio-optical image shows five new clouds of hydrogen gas discovered using the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT). The spiral galaxy M81 and its satellite, M82, are seen in visible light (white); intergalactic hydrogen gas revealed by the GBT is shown in red; and additional hydrogen gas earlier detected by the Very Large Array is shown in green...

1/9/08: Radio Telescopes' Precise Measurements Yield Rich Scientific Payoffs. Having the sharpest pictures always is a big advantage, and a sophisticated radio-astronomy technique using continent-wide and even intercontinental arrays of telescopes is yielding extremely valuable scientific results in a wide range of specialties. That's the message delivered to the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Austin, Texas, by Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a leading researcher in the field of ultra-precise astronomical position measurements...

1/8/08: Cosmic Radio Series Brings Celestial Science Down to Earth. A new series of short radio programs designed to bring the space-age science of radio astronomy down to Earth is being launched by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and Allegheny Mountain Radio. The series, called Cosmic Radio, covers topics ranging from exciting recent scientific discoveries to how radio telescopes help explore the Universe, to the fascinating history of radio astronomy.

1/8/08: VLBA Movies Reveal New Details of Cosmic Jets. Astronomers have known for decades that supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies can shoot out jets of subatomic particles at tremendous speeds. However, details about the physics of such jets, including how they are generated, how the high-speed flows are shaped into jets, and how fast the particles are moving, among many others, have remained elusive.