Coding (and Coloring) the Universe

Micro to macro
Micro to macro
Illustration: NASA/CXC/K.Divona

When people ask me what I do for work, I often say that I’m a storyteller. It’s not that I stand on a stage with a microphone and narrate long tales to a rapt audience.

My stories are told differently, not through voice or music, but through lines of code and technical applications. They are stories, of science.

As an undergraduate, I began my career in molecular biology, looking at the tiny organisms that can transmit Lyme disease to humans aboard the Ixodes Scapularis (a.k.a., the Deer tick). But by the time I graduated, I was moving on to learn about another type of science: that of computers.

Cosmic Genealogy: the Ancestors of Supermassive Black Holes

Fabio Pacucci
Fabio Pacucci

It is a pleasure to welcome Fabio Pacucci as a guest blogger. Fabio led the study that is the subject of our latest press release. He is going to defend his Ph.D. Thesis at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (Italy), under the supervision of Andrea Ferrara. During his Ph.D. he spent several months at the Institute d’Astrophysique de Paris (IAP) in France, Yale University and Harvard University in the USA. In September he is starting his first postdoctoral position at Yale University. Fabio has mainly been working on understanding the properties of the first black hole seeds, formed when the Universe was less than one billion years old.

It was a sunny and hot afternoon in Pisa when Andrea Ferrara, my Ph.D. supervisor, suggested that I study the first black holes formed in the Universe. This topic is among the most interesting in cosmology. We know that almost every galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at its center. In the Milky Way there is a black hole about 4 million times more massive than the Sun, but objects up to 10 billion times the mass of the Sun have also been observed.

Help Wanted: A Universe of Images

Survey

Images of our shared Universe provide snapshots of various phases of life and death, and different physical phenomena, found in locations across the cosmos. Modern telescopes allow us to “see” what the human eye cannot. This new generation of ground- and space-based telescopes has created an explosion of images for people everywhere to explore.

The Aesthetics & Astronomy project studies the perception of multi-wavelength astronomical imagery and the effects of the scientific and artistic choices in processing this astronomical data. The images come from a variety of space and ground-based observatories, including NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope. Studies such as these can benefit astronomy across the electromagnetic spectrum of astronomical images, and may help visualization of data in other scientific disciplines.

Chandra Movie Captures Expanding Debris From a Stellar Explosion

Tycho's Supernova Remnant
When the star that created this supernova remnant exploded in 1572, it was so bright that it was visible during the day. And though he wasn't the first or only person to observe this stellar spectacle, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe wrote a book about his extensive observations of the event, gaining the honor of it being named after him.

"Russian Doll" Galaxy Clusters Reveal Information About Dark Energy

We are happy to welcome Dr. Andrea Morandi as our guest blogger, who is giving us insight into his recent work on using galaxy clusters to investigate the nature of dark energy. Originally from Italy, Dr. Morandi received his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Bologna. Prior to his current position as a research assistant at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Dr. Morandi was a post-doctoral fellow at the DARK Cosmology Center in Copenhagen and Tel Aviv University, followed by time as a research associate at Purdue University.

Andrea Morandi

In 1998 and 1999 astronomers discovered the accelerating expansion of the Universe, providing evidence for the existence of the mysterious dark energy driving this acceleration. The same year I started to study astronomy at the Bologna University, fascinated by this major breakthrough in cosmology. I guess my interest for cosmology started from here.

Comets in the "X"-Treme

Comets ISON & PanSTARRS
For millennia, people on Earth have watched comets in the sky. Many ancient cultures saw comets as the harbingers of doom, but today scientists know that comets are really frozen balls of dust, gas, and rock and may have been responsible for delivering water to planets like Earth billions of years ago.

Jupiter: Solar Storms Ignite 'Northern Lights' on Jupiter

Jupiter
Solar storms are triggering X-ray auroras on Jupiter that are about eight times brighter than normal over a large area of the planet and hundreds of times more energetic than Earth's 'northern lights,' according to a new study using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. This result is the first time that Jupiter's auroras have been studied in X-ray light when a giant solar storm arrived at the planet.

Telescopes Combine to Push Frontier on Galaxy Clusters

Frontier Fields
Galaxy clusters are enormous collections of hundreds or even thousands of galaxies and vast reservoirs of hot gas embedded in massive clouds of dark matter, invisible material that does not emit or absorb light but can be detected through its gravitational effects. These cosmic giants are not merely novelties of size or girth - rather they represent pathways to understanding how our entire universe evolved in the past and where it may be heading in the future.

New X-ray Observatory Comes Online

On February 17th, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched a rocket into space with the X-ray Astronomy Satellite, also known as ASTRO-H, onboard.

Hitomi
Credit: NASA

Shortly thereafter, ASTRO-H separated from the spacecraft and deployed its solar panels. Operators then received data transmitted from the satellite and received at the Uchinoura ground station in Japan. All reports are that the satellite is currently in good health.

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