Monday, January 16, 2012
The scientists of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), including astronomers at Penn State, have produced a new map of the universe that is in full color, covers more than one quarter of the entire sky, and is full of so much detail that you would need five-hundred-thousand high-definition TVs to view it all. The map consists of more than one-trillion pixels measured by meticulously scanning the sky with a special-purpose telescope located in New Mexico. This week, at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas, the SDSS scientists announced results of four separate studies of this new map that, taken together, provide a history of the universe over the last six-billion years. (more)
Friday, August 13, 2010
A new report, prepared for the National Academy of Sciences by the National Research Council, ranked the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) as the top U.S. priority for the next large ground-based astronomical facility. "The LSST is one of the most ambitious ground-based astronomical projects ever undertaken," said Larry Ramsey, head of Penn State's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and a member of the LSST Board of Directors. "It promises to provide fundamental advances in many fields of astrophysics, from the identification of potential 'killer asteroids' to the global properties of the universe." The 8.4-meter LSST telescope, to be placed on a mountain in northern Chile, will be equipped with the world's largest digital camera -- 3.2 billion pixels -- to construct a color "movie" of the entire visible sky for studying changes in movement or brightness. (more)
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Astronomers have discovered what appear to be two of the earliest and most primitive supermassive black holes known. The discovery, based on observations with the NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and other space observatories, will be published in the March 18 edition of the scientific journal Nature. Black holes are beastly distortions of space and time. The most massive and active ones lurk at the cores of galaxies, and are usually surrounded by doughnut-shaped structures of dust and gas that feed and sustain the growing black holes. These hungry supermassive black holes are called quasars. "The main goal of this collaboration is to determine if these very first quasars -- which are very distant from Earth in space and time -- are feeding and growing in the same way as do quasars that are closer to Earth," said Niel Brandt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University. (more)
Thursday, May 28, 2009
A supermassive black hole lurking deep in the heart of a distant active galaxy has been probed more closely than ever before by a team of astronomers that includes Penn State Professor of Astronomy Niel Brandt. Using new X-ray data from the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite, the team observed the galaxy -- known as 1H0707-495 -- for four 48-hour-long periods, revealing the innermost depths of the galaxy.
"The black hole at the heart of this galaxy appears to be eating the material within its reach at a remarkably high rate," Brandt said. "Our observations reveal that the black hole appears to be spinning very rapidly and is eating matter so quickly that it verges on the theoretical limit of its eating ability, swallowing the equivalent of two Earths per hour." (more)
