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19 December 2011: It sounds like the start of a bad joke: do you know about the bar in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy? Astronomers first recognized almost 80 years ago that the Milky Way Galaxy, around which the sun and its planets orbit, is a huge spiral galaxy. This isn’t obvious when you look at the band of starlight across the sky, because we are inside the galaxy: it’s as if the sun and solar system is a bug on the spoke of a bicycle wheel. But in recent decades astronomers have suspected that the center of our galaxy has an elongated stellar structure, or bar, that is hidden by dust and gas from easy view. Many spiral galaxies in the universe are known to exhibit such a bar through the center bulge, while other spiral galaxies are simple spirals. And astronomers ask, why? In a recent paper Dr. Andrea Kunder, of Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in northern Chile, and a team of colleagues have presented data that demonstrates how this bar is rotating.

1 December 2011: Observations with the Gemini North telescope in Hawai‘i reveal evidence for what astronomers are calling the largest black holes ever measured in our nearby cosmological neighborhood. This result is crucial in explaining the long-standing mystery of where the largest black holes are hiding in our present-day universe.

30 November 2011: The NASA Kepler Mission is designed to survey a portion of our region of the Milky Way Galaxy to discover Earth-size planets in or near the “habitable zone,” the region in a planetary system where liquid water can exist, and determine how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets. It now has another planet to add to its growing list. A research team led by Steve Howell, NASA Ames Research Center, has shown that one of the brightest stars in the Kepler star field has a planet with a radius only 1.6 that of the earth’s radius and a mass no greater that 10 earth masses, circling its parent star with a 2.8 day period. With such a short period, and such a bright star, the team of over 65 astronomers (that included David Silva, Ken Mighell and Mark Everett of NOAO) needed multiple telescopes on the ground to support and confirm their Kepler observations. These included the 4 meter Mayall telescope and the WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. The accompanying figure shows the size of the Kepler field, seen over Kitt Peak.

20 November 2011: An asteroid impact with the earth can really ruin your day: just consider the dinosaurs. Most asteroids, also known as minor planets, orbit the sun beyond the planet Mars and present no danger, but there is a class of asteroids whose orbits cross the orbit of the earth. If one of these asteroids and the earth are at the same point in their orbits at the same time, a collision could occur. Called Near Earth Objects (NEOs), astronomers are interested in discovering as many of these as possible, and then tracking them in order to compute more accurate orbits. In this way, if a potential future collision were to be identified many years in advance, space probes could carry out steps to tweak the path of the NEO and deflect the collision. A program to track NEOs is being carried out at NOAO by Mark Trueblood with Robert Crawford (Rincon Ranch Observatory) and Larry Lebofsky (Planetary Science Institute). And last summer, a Beloit College student, Morgan Rehnberg, has developed a computer program (PhAst), available via the web, to help with this effort.

10 August 2011: A team of astronomers, using the Spitzer Space Telescope, have reported the first extragalactic detection of the C70 fullerene molecule, and the possible detection of planar C24 (“a piece of graphene”) in space. Letizia Stanghellini and Richard Shaw, members of the team at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona describe how collisional shocks powered by the winds from old stars in planetary nebulae could be responsible for the formation of fullerenes (C60 and C70) and graphene (planar C24). The team is led by Domingo Aníbal García-Hernández of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain and includes international astronomers and biochemists.

25 July 2011: In a partnership between amateur and professional astronomers, the recent discovery of a dying star’s last gasps could help resolve a decades-old debate among astronomers. That is, are stellar companions key to the formation and structure of planetary nebulae?

18 July 2011: Astronomers from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and their collaborators have found that hundreds of the stars found in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) were stolen from another nearby galaxy – the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are both neighbor galaxies to our Milky Way Galaxy and easily visible to the unaided eye from the southern hemisphere.

29 June 2011: An international team of astronomers announced today the discovery of the most distant known supermassive black hole, seen as a luminous quasar [1] caused by gas falling into the black hole.

25 May 2011: In a game of cosmological one-upmanship, what is likely the most distant gamma ray burst (GRB) ever detected could be presenting humanity with a glimpse back to within about half a billion years of the Big Bang. "Like any finding of this sort there are uncertainties,” said the study's principal investigator Antonino Cucchiara. “However, if I were in Vegas, I would never bet against the odds that this is the most distant GRB ever seen and we estimate that there is even a 23% chance that it is the most distant object ever observed in the universe."

23 February 2011: When two galaxies merge to form a giant, the central supermassive black hole in the new galaxy develops an insatiable appetite. However, this ferocious appetite is unsustainable.

12 January 2011: Astronomers led by Karl Gebhardt of The University of Texas at Austin have measured the most massive known black hole in our cosmic neighborhood by combining data from a giant telescope in Hawai'i and a smaller telescope in Texas. The result is an ironclad mass of 6.6 billion Suns for the black hole in the giant elliptical galaxy M87. This enormous mass is the largest ever measured for a black hole using a direct technique. Given its massive size, M87 is the best candidate for future studies to actually "see" a black hole for the first time, rather than relying on indirect evidence of their existence as astronomers have for decades.

27 October 2010: Astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have detected arrangements of carbon atoms known as buckyballs outside of the Milky Way galaxy for the first time. Sir Harry Kroto of Florida State University, who won a Nobel Prize for discovering buckyballs, says life may even owe its existence to the atom “cages” which resemble soccer balls. The discovery of buckyballs in the Small Magellanic Cloud suggests that these complex molecules may be present around many stars where it was predicted they would be unlikely to form. Extensive follow-up studies using ground-based telescopes will be used to establish the conditions helpful for the formation of buckyballs in our galaxy and other galaxies.

21 September 2010: New measurements of the Kitt Peak National Observatory night sky brightness by Lowell Observatory astronomers show that, despite Tucson’s rapid growth, the sky brightness has remained remarkably constant over the past 20 years. The measurements suggest that the strengthened lighting ordinances adopted by Tucson and surrounding Pima County have been effective in suppressing the sky glow caused by outdoor lighting.

29 June 2010: A planet only about eight times the mass of Jupiter has been confirmed orbiting a Sun-like star at over 300 times farther from the star than the Earth is from our Sun. The newly confirmed planet is the least massive planet known to orbit at such a great distance from its host star. The discovery utilized high-resolution adaptive optics technology at the Gemini Observatory to take direct images and spectra of the planet.

12 May 2010: A newly discovered gravitational lens in a relatively nearby galaxy cluster is leading astronomers to conclude that the cluster hosts the most massive galaxy known in our local universe. The study also reaffirms that galactic cannibalism is one reason that this galaxy is so obese, tipping the scales at up to 30 trillion times the mass of our Sun.

6 April 2010: The cliché that youth grow up so fast is about to take on a new twist. This is due to the discovery of a very young planet-like object (with a mass somewhere between 5-10 times that of Jupiter), paired with a low-mass brown dwarf. What is unique about this system is that the planet-like body appears to have formed in about a million years–more rapidly than some theories of planet formation predict.

22 February 2010: In one of the nearest giant clusters of galaxies, Abell 3627, astronomers have reported finding a galaxy with two distinct tails of gas. Of particular significance, there are unambiguous signs of current star formation in this gas tail, providing the first evidence that star formation can actively take place in the cold intergalactic medium. These results challenge ideas based on the current computer simulations and modeling.

27 January 2010: Explaining how the most massive stars are born, deep within their stellar nurseries, is one of the most persistent mysteries in modern astronomy. Now, observations at the Gemini Observatory provide convincing new evidence that these stellar heavyweights may be born in much the same manner as lightweights like our Sun.

5 January 2010: Using the Gemini South telescope in Chile, astronomers at UCLA have found dusty evidence for the formation of young, rocky planets around a star some 500 light years distant. But these potential extrasolar worlds are alien in an even more intriguing way… In the aftermath of collisions between planetary embryos around this star the researchers discovered that the dusty debris bears no resemblance to the planetary building blocks of our own Solar System.

21 December 2009: Astronomers have reported new observations of a remarkable binary star population in a well-known star cluster.