The LISA mission will enable observations of gravitational waves produced by merging supermassive black holes, seen here in a computer simulation. Most big galaxies contain central black holes weighing millions of times the mass of our Sun. When these galaxies collide, eventually their black holes do too. Download high-resolution video from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. … Read more
“There’s ongoing debate in the scientific community about how galaxies evolve,” said Kimberly Weaver, an astrophysicist at Goddard who led the work. “We find supermassive black holes in the centers of nearly all Milky Way-sized galaxies, and an open question is how much influence they have compared to the effects of star formation. Studying nearby … Read more
From solar flares to black hole jets: NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope team has produced a unique time-lapse tour of the dynamic high-energy sky. Fermi Deputy Project Scientist Judy Racusin narrates the movie, which compresses 14 years of gamma-ray observations into 6 minutes. Download high-resolution video and images from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. Credit: NASA’s … Read more
To ensure it can withstand the rattling it will experience at launch, the mission team transported BurstCube to Washington Laboratories in Frederick, Maryland, for vibration testing. Engineers strapped the satellite to a plate, which then vibrated at frequencies ranging from 20 to 20,000 hertz. Translated into sound, that spans bass to the upper limit of … Read more