Author Archives: sarahmaddison

About 30 cosmic rays travel through your body every second. In a night of sleep, up to a million of them will have gone through you! What are they? Well, they are cosmic, but they are not ‘rays’ in reality. … Continue reading →

This week marked the 10th anniversary of science operations of the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Launched 12 August 2005, MRO commenced orbit around Mars on 10 March 2006. During its 10 years of orbital reconnaissance and exploration of Mars, … Continue reading →

About 1 billion years ago, two black holes orbiting each other finished their mutual ‘death-spiral’ and coalesced. Prior to the final merger event, during their mutual orbit they lost rotational energy, which made them move closer together and also speed … Continue reading →

The wheels fell off (again…) last semester, but we’re back! So get ready for another fabulous semester of SAO astro news 🙂

Quasars are galaxies with unusually large luminosities, much more than can be associated with the typical constituents of galaxies, i.e. their stars, gas and dust. Quasars are known to host supermassive black holes (SMBH) at their centres, which is thought to … Continue reading →

After more than 10 years in space and over 4 years orbiting Mercury, the MESSENGER mission ended last week when the spacecraft crashed into the surface of the planet on April 30th. While the impact was not visible from Earth, … Continue reading →

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the afterglow of the Big Bang, cooled to the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum by the expansion of the Universe for ~14 billion years. Across the entire sky radiation at 2.7 K is evident … Continue reading →

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope, launched 24 April 1990. Operating in the optical, ultraviolet and near-infrared wavebands, HST’s low-earth orbit gives it unprecedented image quality outside of the “blurring” of the Earth’s turbulent atmosphere. HST … Continue reading →

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope, astronomers have for the first time detected an extremely powerful magnetic field near the event horizon of a supermassive black hole in the centre of an active galaxy. This discovery supports the … Continue reading →

For the first time, astronomers have found complex organic molecules in a protoplanetary disk. Using the ALMA telescope, the discovery of methyl cyanide (CH3CN),  cyanoacetylene (HC3N) and hydrogen cyanide (HCN) in the dusty, gas-rich disk surrounding the young star MWC 480, show that … Continue reading →