Topic: Pamela Gay
DESI Takes Census of Black Holes in More Than One Million Galaxies

DESI Takes Census of Black Holes in More Than One Million Galaxies

by | Mar 9, 2025 |

Artist's illustration depicting a dwarf galaxy that hosts an active galactic nucleus (credit: NOIRLab) Back when I started astronomy in the 1990s, folks joked that a sample of 6 was big enough to do statistics. In those early days of digital cameras and multi-meter telescopes, it still took a night or more to observe a single galaxy.  I bring this up because a recent press release casually failed to mention that a new publication using the Dark Energy Survey Instrument started with a sample of 1,385,177 galaxy spectra… and this is just galaxies from their Early Data Release. There are...

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Gas Ripples Shake Up Ancient Galaxies

Gas Ripples Shake Up Ancient Galaxies

by | Dec 27, 2023 |

FIR image of BRI 1335–0417 overlaid with our identified bar ellipses (blue ellipse) and two-armed spiral structure identified in Tsukui & Iguchi (2021, black solid line). Contours start at 2σ but are logarithmically spaced in powers of 2 (2σ, 4σ, 8σ,...)....

Neutron Stars Have Quarky Cores

Neutron Stars Have Quarky Cores

by | Dec 27, 2023 |

Artist’s impression of the different layers inside a massive neutron star, with the red circle representing a sizable quark-matter core. Credit: Jyrki Hokkanen, CSC Ok, hold onto your brains; things are about to get dense around here. Our universe’s most massive stars...

Closer Look: The Requirements for Life

Closer Look: The Requirements for Life

by | Dec 20, 2023 | ,

Hydrothermal-vent chimney. In the center of the photo, you can see the vent fluid which appears like dark smoke due to the high levels of minerals and sulfides contained in the fluid. Look closely, and you will also see the chimney is crawling with Chorocaris shrimp...

Talking to Whales

Talking to Whales

by | Dec 20, 2023 |

Credit: Jodi Frediani; NOAA/National Marine Fisheries Research Permit 19703 The kinds of life many of us hope to find within our solar system likely won’t be all that intellectual. Those possible microbes on Mars might be able to respond to food or pain, but that’s...

One Theory Puts Us Somewhere Special

One Theory Puts Us Somewhere Special

by | Dec 20, 2023 |

The image shows the distribution of matter in space (blue; the yellow dots represent individual galaxies). The Milky Way (green) lies in an area with little matter. The galaxies in the bubble move in the direction of the higher matter densities (red arrows). The...

Finding the Source of Low-Hydrogen Supernovae

Finding the Source of Low-Hydrogen Supernovae

by | Dec 20, 2023 |

Visualization of a binary star experiencing mass transfer. Credit: Ylva Götberg One factor upping the difficulty of understanding our universe is… the complexity of our universe. It sometimes feels like every time we think we’re getting a handle on how things work,...

Small star hosts (smaller) huge planet

Small star hosts (smaller) huge planet

by | Dec 13, 2023 |

Artistic rendering of the possible view from LHS 3154b towards its low mass host star. Given its large mass, LHS 3154b probably has a Neptune-like composition. Credit: Penn State Solar systems keep finding new ways to surprise us and to convince us that we don’t...