An intermediate-mass black hole lurking undetected in a dwarf galaxy revealed itself to astronomers when it gobbled up an unlucky star that strayed too close. The shredding of the star, known as a “tidal disruption event” or TDE, produced a flare of radiation that briefly outshone the combined stellar light of the host dwarf galaxy […]
The universe is a big place. Thinking about how we fit into it is part of what makes humans (and cats like me) special. I talked about your question with my friend Afshin Khan who studied astrobiology and environmental science at Washington State University. Astrobiologists explore how life began. They also look for signs of […]
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently revealed a batch of out-of-this world images. Webb’s First Deep Field is an infrared image that covers a miniscule patch of sky visible from the Southern hemisphere. The image illustrates the early universe with thousands of shimmering galaxies that help fill the celestial void. It is the highest resolution […]
Intermediate-mass black holes are notoriously hard to find but a new study indicates there may be some at the center of dense, star clusters located throughout the universe. “One of the biggest open questions in black hole astrophysics right now is how do black holes form that are between the size of a stellar mass […]
As winter gets underway here in North America, you may notice we don’t feel the sun’s rays for quite as many hours as we did in fall and summer. To find out why this happens, I talked with my friend Vivienne Baldassare, an astronomer at Washington State University. “Earth isn’t perfectly straight up and down,” Baldassare […]
About 300 years ago during another pandemic, there was a person named Sir Isaac Newton who spent a lot of time at home thinking about the universe. That’s what I found out from my friend Guy Worthey, an astronomer at Washington State University. Gravity plays a big part in the answer to your question, and […]
Our universe is just like a mystery novel with a thriller “whodunnit” plot. It’s waiting to get demystified as scientists across the world continue to brainstorm the very existence and sustainability of life on Earth and even the presence of extraterrestrial matter floating in space. Is life possible beyond Earth? Is Big Bang the beginning […]
While we can’t see black holes with our eyes, astronomers have figured out how to spot these objects in our universe. One astronomer who is really curious about understanding black holes is my friend Sukanta Bose, a researcher at Washington State University. “Of course, we cannot see every galaxy,” Bose said. “We see many galaxies that […]
WSU professor shows Hubble Space Telescope’s greatest images, details history About 50 people tilted their heads back, gazed up at the Washington State University Planetarium dome and took in images from space Sunday at Sloan Hall on the WSU campus in Pullman. Long before Sunday’s sunset, viewers sat in the dark room looking up at […]
Three billion years ago in a distant galaxy, two massive black holes slammed together, merged into one and sent space–time vibrations, known as gravitational waves, shooting out into the universe. The waves passed through Earth and were detected early this year by an international team of scientists, including WSU physicists Sukanta Bose, Bernard Hall and […]