In partnership with the news team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the UW News office has posted a story about a rare and mysterious star system discovered by a team of astronomers and reported in a paper published this morning in Nature. The researchers report that the system appears to be a “black widow binary” […]
Astronomy, satellites, and the future of our sky Join us Thursday, May 5th at Noon PDT on Zoom We are witnessing a new era as skies fill with thousands of low-Earth-orbit satellites that reflect sunlight. Observational astronomy at all wavelengths is increasingly affected, and so is the shared human experience of the night sky. For optical ground-based astronomy, the […]
Distant galaxies come into focus as Webb is on track to meet or exceed expectations. Today, NASA announced that it has successfully completed two further steps to align the mirrors of the Webb telescope. The resulting performance indicates that Webb will meet or exceed its design goals.
“Part of the reason for that shape is that these galaxies are still so close to each other, and NGC 2444 is still holding on to the other galaxy gravitationally,” participating astronomer Julianne Dalcanton, of the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York and the University of Washington in Seattle, said in the […]
“We’re witnessing a new era as skies fill with thousands of bright satellites,” said Meredith Rawls, a research scientist with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the DiRAC Institute at the UW. “In just the last two years, astronomers have realized this will impact our ability to achieve science goals from ground-based facilities like Rubin Observatory.”
Nine years ago today, an asteroid exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia. It was only about 20 meters in diameter (or 55-65 feet) — by meteor and asteroid standards, pretty small, but as you may remember, it packed a punch.
The Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet is named after its discoverers, University of Washington postdoctoral scholar Pedro Bernardinelli, and University of Pennsylvania cosmologist Gary Bernstein, who first spotted the comet in the Dark Energy Survey dataset.