A long-faded black hole outburst may have left material that a cosmic collision made visible again. That is the proposed history of VLSS J0318.9+5755, a radio source nicknamed the Treble Clef because of its distinctive outline. A composite view of the Treble Clef: X-rays in blue, radio emission in pink, and infrared data. Credits: X-ray: […]
Writing Divino e Stellato has been, for me, like embarking on a journey back through time, with my gaze always fixed on the sky. It was not a race to unveil hidden secrets, but a slow and respectful path: made of silences, of readings, of nights spent between telescopes and ancient texts, between photographs of […]
Radio astronomy is a relatively young science compared to optical astronomy. It found its early developments in the 1930s, over 300 years after the first observations in the visible spectrum. It was Karl Jansky, a researcher at Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1931, who, using an array of antennas over 30 meters in length, recorded radiation […]
Seeing Beyond Since the beginning of astronomical observations in antiquity, humans sought a way to enhance the light-gathering capabilities of our eyes. Initially, the focus was on the visible spectrum: it appears that in the early 1600s, the first telescopes were already circulating in the Netherlands, although not for scientific-astronomical use. It was only in […]
From the Bits of Universe archive — 12/07/2022 NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb’s first deep field, this image of the SMACS 0723 galaxy cluster is bursting with detail. Thousands of galaxies, including the faintest objects ever observed in […]
From the Bits of Universe archive — 03/03/2021 The Perseverance rover continues to amaze us. Every day NASA sends images, videos and even the first sounds from the planet Mars. The Mars 2020 Perseverance rover will investigate a region of Mars where the ancient environment may have been conducive to microbial life, probing Martian rocks […]
A phantom? A ghost? Well, yes but they are not very scary … because these are very particular ghosts. We call it spectra. You’ve all seen a rainbow: well, colored light of this wonderful natural phenomenon is precisely the light spectrum of sunlight that breaks down into all its components, which in scientific terms we […]
From the Bits of Universe archive — 01/12/2020 The National Science Foundation (NSF) has decided today that a gradual closure of the Arecibo observatory, for years the largest radio telescope in the world with its 305m in diameter, will be initiated on the island of Puerto Rico. A painful but inevitable decision: the National Science […]
Since childhood, observing the sky has always been a passion, almost a must. The arrival of the night was a magical moment for me, while the dawn was always a bit sad. You know, life runs fast during the day, while at night everything seems more muffled, everything is quieter. And the stars come. Over […]
Emotion is a highly sought-after word. It is not easy to excite someone and when someone succeeds with us, they leave us something special and unique. Getting excited by “something” rather than someone is even more difficult. We are bombarded with infinite inputs, from different media, real and virtual, and everything often seems obvious and […]
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