The TAU-SAT1 nanosatellite, approximately the size of a shoebox, is currently undergoing pre-flight testing at the Japanese space agency JAXA prior to a planned launch by NASA in the first quarter of 2021. TAU-SAT1 was entirely devised, developed, assembled, and tested at Tel Aviv University’s Nanosatellite Center, an interdisciplinary endeavor of the University’s Iby and… Read More
Supermassive black holes weigh millions to billions times more than our sun and lie at the center of most galaxies. A supermassive black hole several million times the mass of the sun is situated in the heart of our very own Milky Way. Despite how commonplace supermassive black holes are, it remains unclear how they… Read More
In 1963, astronomer Maarten Schmidt identified the first quasi-stellar object or “quasar,” an extremely bright but distant object. He found the single quasar, the active nucleus of a far-away galaxy known to astronomers as 3C 273, to be 100 times more luminous than all the stars in our Milky Way combined. Now, the GRAVITY international… Read More
A team of astronomers from Israel, the United States and Russia have identified a disrupted galaxy resembling a giant tadpole, complete with an elliptical head and a long, straight tail, about 300 million light years away from Earth. The galaxy is 1 million light-years long from end to end, 10 times longer than the Milky… Read More
Neutron stars are the smallest, densest stars in the universe, born out of the gravitational collapse of extremely massive stars. True to their name, neutron stars are composed almost entirely of neutrons — neutral subatomic particles that have been compressed into a small, incredibly dense celestial package. A new study in Nature suggests that some… Read More
A team of astronomers led by Prof. Judd Bowman of Arizona State University unexpectedly stumbled upon “dark matter,” the most mysterious building block of outer space, while attempting to detect the earliest stars in the universe through radio wave signals, according to a study published this week in Nature. The idea that these signals implicate… Read More