Latest Very Large Array Stories

Astronomers studying the Milky Way have discovered a large number of previously-unknown regions where massive stars are being formed. Their discovery provides important new information about the structure of our home Galaxy and promises to yield new clues about the chemical composition of the Galaxy."We can clearly relate the locations of these star-forming sites to the overall structure of the Galaxy. Further studies will allow us to better understand the process of star formation and...

VLA sees most distant object in universe, gets key physics dataAstronomers using the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope have gained tantalizing insights into the nature of the most distant object ever observed in the Universe -- a gigantic stellar explosion known as a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB).The explosion was detected on April 23 by NASA's Swift satellite, and scientists soon realized that it was more than 13 billion light-years from Earth. It represents an...

Scientists from NRL's Space Science and Remote Sensing Divisions, in collaboration with researchers from the University of New Mexico (UNM) and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) located in Socorro, N.M., have generated the first scientific results from the Long Wavelength Demonstrator Array (LWDA). The measurements were obtained during field tests and calibration of two prototype antennas for the much larger Long Wavelength Array (LWA), which will eventually consist of nearly...

New radio surveys could turn up many supernovas hidden within gas and dustThe chance discovery last month of a rare radio supernova - an exploding star seen only at radio wavelengths and undetected by optical or X-ray telescopes - underscores the promise of new, more sensitive radio surveys to find supernovas hidden by gas and dust."This supernova is the nearest supernova in five years, yet is completely obscured in optical, ultraviolet and X-rays due to the dense medium of the...

Black holes may have come before the formation of galaxies, astronomers reported on Wednesday, adding information that could provide new insights into the nature of the mysterious invisible black objects. At the  213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, California, researchers said they discovered a clear link between the mass of a black hole and the galaxy where it was spotted. "It looks like the black holes came first. The evidence is piling up," said...

A team of scientists, including astronomers from the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), have detected long wavelength radio emission from a colliding, massive galaxy cluster which, surprisingly, is not detected at the shorter wavelengths typically seen in these objects.The discovery implies that existing radio telescopes have missed a large population of these colliding objects. It also provides an important confirmation of the theoretical prediction that colliding galaxy clusters accelerate...

Radio-telescope images have revealed previously-unseen galactic cannibalism -- a triggering event that leads to feeding frenzies by gigantic black holes at the cores of galaxies. Astronomers have long suspected that the extra-bright cores of spiral galaxies called Seyfert galaxies are powered by supermassive black holes consuming material. However, they could not see how the material is started on its journey toward the black hole.One leading theory said that Seyfert galaxies have been...

The most recent supernova in our Galaxy has been discovered by tracking the rapid expansion of its remains. This result, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and NRAO's Very Large Array (VLA), has implications for understanding how often supernovas explode in the Milky Way galaxy.The supernova explosion occurred about 140 years ago, making it the most recent supernova in the Milky Way as measured in Earth's time frame. Previously, the last known galactic supernova occurred around 1680,...

This is a new composite image of galaxy cluster MS0735.6+7421, located about 2.6 billion light-years away in the constellation Camelopardus. The three views of the region were taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in Feb. 2006, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in Nov. 2003, and NRAO's Very Large Array in Oct. 2004. The Hubble image shows dozens of galaxies bound together by gravity. In Jan. 2005, astronomers reported that a supermassive black hole, lurking in the central bright galaxy,...

NRAO -- Astronomers have found a relatively tiny galaxy whose black-hole-powered "central engine" is pouring out energy at a rate equal to that of much larger galaxies, and they're wondering how it manages to do so. The astronomers used the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope and optical telescopes at the Apache Point Observatory to study a galaxy dubbed J170902+641728, more than a billion light-years from Earth."This thing looks like a quasar...