Category Archives: Astronomy

There's a lot happening in the night sky in the upcoming days and weeks.

First off, the Orionids Meteor Shower will peak this week. The shower actually stretches from late September through November, but is scheduled to peak between midnight and dawn Tuesday, October 22. It's a minor shower producing around 20 per hour at its peak. The meteors will appear to radiate from the constellation Orion, and originate from the comet Halley.

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Below is a list of planets, along with their position in the night sky you'll be able to see:

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Also, mark your calendars for November 11. That's when a rare transit of Mercury will occur. The planet closest to the sun is going to pass directly between the sun and earth on this day, almost like a miniature solar eclipse.

It's a fairly rare event that only happens once every couple years, and about a dozen times in a century. Unfortunately, you won't be able to see it unless you have a special solar filtering telescope.

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Check the forecast for cloud cover near you

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Exciting astronomy events coming up over the Pacific Northwest - KING5.com

Aviation and aerospace company Lockheed Martin will lead crewed flight operations and training, as well as develop the reusable Ascent Element for the lander. Draper, which is a not-for-profit research and development organization, will work on descent guidance and flight avionics. Northrop Grumman, an aviation company responsible the Pegasus rocket, will work on the technology that will bring the landing system down to the Moon.

We guided Apollo to the moon and back nearly 50 years ago, said Kaigham J. Gabriel, the President and CEO of Draper, in a press release. Were ready to do it again with the Blue Origin team for Artemis.

In May, Bezos announced the concept for Blue Origins soft lander, Blue Moon. That project utilizes a larger version of the lander, which can now be used as a model for the HLS.

This partnership is the latest addition to the Artemis program, in which many private aerospace companies have already partnered with NASA to develop new technologies that will help humans establish a presence on the Moon. Creating a reusable and reliable HLS will be key to getting humans to the lunar surface and back to Gateway, a proposed space station that orbits the Moon.

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Blue Origin teams up with other major aerospace companies for human l - Astronomy Magazine

Enlarge / A couple of different types of dark-sky-friendly LED streetlights.

Scott K. Johnson

I feel like were protecting the last tree, in a way. Thats what Flagstaff, Arizona, city council member Austin Aslan said at a recent meeting. The subject of that earnest statement might surprise you: it was streetlights. To be more specific, he was talking about a careful effort to prevent streetlights from washing out the stars in the night sky.

Flagstaff became the first city to earn a designation from the International Dark Sky Association in 2001. That came as a result of its long history of hosting astronomy research at local Lowell Observatory, as well as facilities operated by the US Navy. The city has an official ordinance governing the use of outdoor lightingpublic andprivate.

A few years ago, though, a problem arose. The type of dark-sky-friendly streetlight that the city had been using was going extinct, largely as a casualty of low demand. In fact, as of this summer, there are none left to buy. Meanwhile, the age of the LED streetlight has arrived with a catch: limited night-sky-friendly LED options.

If the city went out and just swapped lumens for the cheapest LED products out there, the astronomers would have marched on city hall with pitchforks and (night-vision-preserving) torches. And that might have been the least of their concerns, as the Navy informed the city last year that brightening of skies 10 percent over current conditions is not compatible with the [Naval Observatorys] mission.

The problem with LEDs boils down to blue light. Older streetlights are high-pressure sodium bulbs, which produce a warm yellow glow around a color temperature of 2,000 K. The bulbs Flagstaff relied on for most of its streetlights were low-pressure sodiuma variant that only emits light at a single wavelength (589 nanometers) near that yellow color, producing something resembling candlelight. Many of the LED streetlights on the market have much cooler color temperatures of 3,000 or even 4,000 K.

As Lowell Observatory Director Jeff Hall told Ars, As day turns to nightand your photopic cone-based vision turns into scotopic, rod-based vision, your sensitivity shifts a little bit blue. And so very blue-rich light at night comes off as really harsh and glaring and creates a lot of visible skyglow. So the less of that spectrum you touch, the better off you are for both visual observations, the night sky, as well as astronomy.

Hall continued: I see this wherever I go in my travels. By default, cities just put up, you know, 3,000 degrees CCT white, sometimes 4,000, which is this blue light. Just lumen for lumen [that] will create two-and-a-half to three times the skyglow of a high-pressure sodium system and, like, six times the skyglow of a low-pressure sodium system.

And the greater the skyglow around you, the harder it is to see the stars.

There are ways to build LED lights that change their natural color and mitigate this blue light problem. One way to do it is to simply throw a filter on the LED that blocks blue wavelengths from passing through. Of course, this significantly reduces the amount of light you produce for each watt of electricity. There are some aesthetic trade-offs, as wellof which not everyone is a fan.

What's left is green, Hall said. And so you stand under this and it's like the zombie apocalypse, because everybody's green. They've gone to these in Hilo, Hawaii, and we were standing in a parking lot trying to talk to each other, and it's just like straight out of Night of the Living Dead.

Another way to do it is with phosphor coatings on the LED that absorb light of one wavelength and emit it at another wavelength. Lights known as phosphor-converted amber (PCA) shift all the light out of the blue and into the yellow part of the spectrum at the cost of some efficiency. The result is actually quite close to the ubiquitous high-pressure sodium streetlights were used to.

Narrow-band amber (NBA) LEDs provide a different option. These lights actually use a type of LED that only emits warmer colors from the start. In this way, they actually compare pretty well to the low-pressure sodium streetlights that recently went extinct. The range of wavelengths emitted is a little broader, but the practical effect is about the same.

The downsides of the NBAs are basically cost and efficiency. But both have improved considerably over the last few years. Flagstaff Traffic Engineer Jeff Baumannwho is in charge of the plan for replacing the citys 3,500 streetlightstold Ars that the available NBA options have recently climbed over 30 lumens per watt (on the ground), with efficiencies over 40 right around the corner. For comparison, the citys low-pressure sodium streetlights weigh in at about 50 lumens per watt.

Separately from all this wavelength wrangling, though, LEDs do have a strong natural advantagetheyre highly directional. That is, LED streetlights do a much better job of only lighting the street (rather than the adjacent homes). That means that fewer lumens coming out of the fixture can give the same result you had before.

Flagstaffs plan is generally to swap in NBA LEDs for all the low-pressure sodium lights, and PCA LEDs for the high-pressure sodium lights that are used along the busier streets (as theyre a little brighter). The better directionality of LEDscombined with resident requests for slightly dimmer lighting on residential streetsactually means that the total output of the citys streetlights is going to drop from about 29 million lumens to about 19 million lumens. Thats not unusual.

If you absolutely must use white LEDs, you could do what Tucson has done, Hall said. They... switched out their whole high-pressure sodium system to 3,000 degree white but reduced their lumen budget for street lighting from 480 million to, like, 170 million [lumens] or something. And you need to do that. For every white LED lumen, you're increasing your skyglow by a factor of about three, but they cut the lumen budget by about a factor of three. So overall, they managed to wash out the skyglowbecause theyve got a lot of observatories down there.

Of course, this isnt just an engineering optimization problem. Theres also public buy-in to contend with. In this case, the city of Flagstaff put up test sections of different fixtures around town so anyone interested could compare and provide feedback. And since public safety is the primary reason streetlights exist in the first place, perceptions (which can vary wildly) about how much or what kind of light qualifies as safe can force some compromises.

The astronomers in the community may point to studies suggesting that increasing lighting beyond a basic threshold level wont reduce crime or accidents, but this isnt always persuasive to those recalling tragic pedestrian collisions.

A single-track emphasis on energy efficiency might also push you toward the most efficientand therefore bluestLEDs you can find. But there are more knobs to turn than just color; without careful analysis, there can be a temptation to put in brighter lights than necessary so long as the overall wattage is lower than what you used to have. Its possible to choose to prioritize lighting color and still bring down energy usage by being careful about brightness levels.

It comes down to the fact that lighting choices dont just affect the things youre intentionally lightingthere are also the things you can avoid lighting. That means there are always ways to ensure that the pale stars of the night sky dont entirely disappear from your universe.

The trick is that its yet another thing you have to study up on in order to get it right. When Ars asked Jeff Hall whether he winces while walking through the outdoor lighting aisle at the local big box home improvement store, he had a solution in mind.

We certainly have had conversations internally about a dark-sky-compliant aisle, he said. There are so many choices to choose from. You know, people don't want to put a lot of duty cycles into it, even if they want to be helpful and be dark-sky compliant. They don't want to have to sit down and do four hours of research to figure out what light they should get. What they want is a box that's got an OK stamp on it. And there are fixtures that have an IDA (International Dark Sky Association) seal of approval.

Flagstaffs hope is basically to do that for cities by producing the first dark-sky ordinance updated to deal with LEDs. That could give other cities an example to follow, even if its not quite as easy as hitting up a dark-sky aisle at their local store.

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How Flagstaff Arizona switched to LEDs without giving astronomers a headache - Ars Technica

Sunday, October 13Full Moon officially arrives at 5:08 p.m. EDT, but it will look completely illuminated all night. You can find it rising in the east shortly after sunset and peaking high in the south around 1 a.m. local daylight time. It dips low in the west by the time morning twilight starts to paint the sky. The Moon lies in southeastern Pisces near that constellations border with Cetus. Octobers Full Moon also goes by the name Hunters Moon. In early autumn, the Full Moon rises about half an hour later each night compared with a normal lag close to 50 minutes. The added early evening illumination supposedly helps hunters track down their prey.

Monday, October 14Although autumn began three weeks ago and the stars of winters Orion now rule the morning sky, the Summer Triangle remains prominent on October evenings. Look high in the west after darkness falls and your eyes will fall on the brilliant star Vega in the constellation Lyra the Harp. At magnitude 0.0, Vega is the brightest member of the triangle. The second-brightest star, magnitude 0.8 Altair in Aquila the Eagle, lies some 35 southeast of Vega. The asterisms dimmest member, magnitude 1.3 Deneb in Cygnus the Swan, stands about 25 east-northeast of Vega. For observers at mid-northern latitudes, Deneb passes through the zenith around 8 p.m. local daylight time, just as the last vestiges of twilight disappear.

Tuesday, October 15After a three-month hiatus lost in the Suns glare, Venus returns to view after sunset in mid-October. Its not easy to see, however it stands just 2 high in the west-southwest a half-hour after sundown. Luckily, the inner planet shines brilliantly at magnitude 3.8 and should show up if you have a haze-free sky and unobstructed horizon. Despite this pedestrian start to its evening apparition, Venus will be a glorious sight this coming winter and spring.

Wednesday, October 16Uranus reaches opposition in just two weeks, and it is already a tempting evening target. The ice giant world rises during twilight and climbs 30 above the eastern horizon by 9:30 p.m. local daylight time. The magnitude 5.7 planet lurks among the background stars of southern Aries. Use binoculars to find the planet 2.7 south of the similarly bright star 19 Arietis. A telescope reveals Uranus blue-green disk, which spans 3.7". To learn more about viewing Uranus and its outer solar system cousin, Neptune, see Observe the ice giants in Octobers Astronomy.

Thursday, October 17The variable star Algol in Perseus reaches minimum brightness at 5:27 a.m. EDT. If you start watching it late yesterday evening, you can see its brightness diminish by 70 percent (its magnitude drops from 2.1 to 3.4) over the course of about five hours. This eclipsing binary star runs through a cycle from minimum to maximum and back every 2.87 days. Algol appears in the northeast during the evening hours and passes nearly overhead around 2 a.m. local daylight time.

Friday, October 18Saturn remains a glorious sight this week. The ringed planet resides among the background stars of Sagittarius the Archer, a region that appears 25 high in the south-southwest as twilight fades to darkness and doesnt set until close to 11 p.m. local daylight time. Saturn shines at magnitude 0.5 and appears significantly brighter than any of its host constellations stars. Although a naked-eye view of the planet is nice, seeing it through a telescope truly inspires. Even a small instrument shows the distant worlds 16"-diameter disk and spectacular ring system, which spans 37" and tilts 25 to our line of sight.

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The Sky This Week from October 11 to 20 - Astronomy Magazine

Uncovering martian historyCuriosity is well suited to studying the evolution of Mars environment because of its access to Gale Crater. The crater formed when a meteor hit Mars at least 3.5 billion years ago, leaving a 100-mile-wide hole in the ground. The crater still exposes layers of rock hundreds of yards deep. The deepest rocks are the oldest, and higher rocks make up younger, more recently formed layers. So, Curiosity can analyze the chemical compositions of rocks and, in the process, document Mars history back at least 3.5 billion years. Its a unique opportunity to study how a planets environment can change across billions of years.

Curiositys latest work shows that rocks in Gale Crater between about 3.3 and 3.7 billion years in age had pockets of sulfur-containing salts called sulfates. Older rocks that Curiosity analyzed didnt have such concentrations of these salts. That leads scientists to believe this is evidence that a lake at Gale Crater was particularly salty around this time. The lake may have gotten saltier then because the waters were evaporating, leaving higher concentrations of salt behind. If true, it implies that Mars climate was changing and becoming drier around 3.5 billion years ago.

To William Rapin, a planetary scientist at Caltech and an author of the new study, the project is an exciting way to uncover Mars history and understand more broadly how planets and their environments evolve over time.

Our geology and our understanding of planets climates is very Earth-centric, Rapin says. Mars has had its own fate, potentially very different than the Earth.

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This lake on Mars was drying up 3.5 billion years ago - Astronomy Magazine

Where in the universe can life evolve? When scientists discuss this question, theyre usually talking about what kinds of planets might support life. But some researchers are thinking bigger.

In recent years, astronomers have been investigating whether some types of galaxies are more hospitable to life than others. Unsurprisingly, most researchers think that large spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way might be good candidates for life. But in a recent paper, one research team proposes that some dwarf galaxies may be another category of habitable galaxies. Though studies of galactic habitability are in their infancy, as the studys authors wrote in their paper, they ask fundamental questions about how life in the universe comes to be.

Its almost [a] completely new field, terra incognita, so to speak, study author Milan irkovi of the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade said via email. Such things are always exciting.

Large spiral galaxies are one galaxy type that researchers think may be good for developing life. Our own planet is the only known example of life arising in such a galaxy, but spirals pack relatively high amounts of the heavy elements needed to form rocky planets.

However, life in a spiral galaxy can have its downsides, too. These galaxies form new stars more actively and have more dangerous cosmic events, like supernova explosions, compared to other galaxies. Those kinds of disasters can spew harmful radiation into nearby space and potentially destroy planets biospheres.

So, perhaps galaxies with less active star formation, and fewer cosmic explosions, might be calmer, safer places that allow planets more time to develop life.

irkovi and his team tested this idea by studying more than 100,000 galaxies that other astronomers created in simulations. They found that small galaxies, or dwarf galaxies, with relatively high amounts of heavy elements may be promising candidates for habitability as well.

For example, the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way, is one example of a high-metallicity dwarf galaxy. These galaxies have plenty of heavy elements for creating rocky planets and tend to be calmer environments with fewer explosions to disrupt the formation of life.

Its a kind of sweet spot in the galactic zoo of all the different galaxies, irkovi wrote.

The researchers published their paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. A version of the paper is accessible on the pre-print site arxiv.org.

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Which galaxies are best suited for the evolution of alien life? - Astronomy Magazine

In 1992, astronomers discovered the first exoplanet, or planet outside our solar system. But it didnt come in any form theyd really anticipated.

Neutron stars are the second densest type of object in the universe outside black holes. They form when a giant star dies and explodes outward as a result of the collapse of its core. Put simply, the star becomes too massive to go on and expels all its energy into the surrounding space. The core is a sort of ground zero of this detonation. When that core collapses, depending on the size of the star, it becomes either a neutron star or a black hole.

Some neutron stars are called pulsars, for the regular pulses they give off in radio frequencies. Think of many of them like a drummer fast regular beats. Some pulsars, called millisecond pulsars, drum so fast that it would put Napalm Deaths drummer Danny Herrera to shame.

Those pulses are so regular that if they dont come at the right interval, astronomers know something is off.

A breakthrough in 1992 provided rock-solid evidence of planets. Astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail tuned into the pulsar PSR B1257+12, 2300 light-years away. It should have pulsed every 0.006219 seconds, but every now and then, its pulses were a little off. Yet those off-beats came at regular intervals as well. After intensive study, Wolszczan and Frail came up with an explanation for why that was: it had two planets around it. One was three and the other four times the mass of Earth, and they rotated around every 67 and 98 days, rounded up.

Pulsar planets are somewhere in between a zombie and a chimera. When a star explodes, usually the planets in that system are destroyed or flung out by a shockwave. But after the violence settles down, the gas and dust can recondense. This, in effect, means that the three planets in B1257 may be made out of parts of the planets that came before them. Given the extreme radiation in these systems, almost no one has ever thought that the B1257 system could host life.

So, while the 1992 discovery was major news, it meant astronomers had the first verified planets around another star, but no proof of planets around a main sequence star like the Sun. That kind of confirmation was still a few years away.

Read More: 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded for Exoplanet Discovery

From the 1980s on, many groups had been on the hunt for the first planet around a Sun-like star. Some candidates came and went. Others required dozens or hundreds of observations to officially confirm.

But an observation in January 1995 proved to be the real deal. Didier Queloz, a grad student at the University of Geneva, was working with his advisor, Michel Mayor, on the search for extrasolar planets via radial velocity, in other words, wobbles.

Reportedly, his find was a chance coincidence. Out of a catalog of radial velocity signatures, he chose an F-type star called 51 Pegasi, roughly 50 light-years distant. He was trying to calibrate his planet finding code, opting for the star as one of a few promising candidates. It fell into place that night, a strong signal roughly every four days.

Measurements placed its minimum mass near Jupiter meaning the object was without a doubt a planet. While astronomers considered it possible to have such periods, it wasnt necessarily expected to find one in such a short period. At this time, I was the only one in the world who knew I had found a planet, Queloz told the BBC in 2016. I was really scared, I can tell you.

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How the first exoplanets were discovered - Astronomy Magazine

Some clues suggest that a flare of energetic radiation burst from our galaxys center within the last few million years. Now, in a new study, a team of researchers describes another piece of evidence that the Milky Way burped out such a flare. The research also points to the supermassive black hole in our galaxys center, called Sagittarius A* or Sgr A*, as the responsible party.

The team also estimated when this event occurred. Their data put the outburst at 3.5 million years ago, give or take a million years. That would mean that the Milky Ways center transitioned from an active to a quiet phase pretty recently in Earths history, possibly when early human ancestors were roaming the planet.

The flare would have been visible to the naked eye, shining about 10 times fainter than the Full Moon across a broad spectrum of light wavelengths.

It would look like the cone of light from a movie projector as it passes through a smoky theater, University of Sydney astrophysicist and lead study author Jonathan Bland-Hawthorn said in an email.

The researchers describe their findings in an upcoming paper in The Astrophysical Journal.

This new piece of evidence comes from examining a stream of gas that arcs around the Milky Way. This stream of gas is like a trail that two dwarf galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, leave as they orbit the Milky Way. The research team studied ultraviolet (UV) light coming from this gas trail, called the Magellanic Stream.

The characteristics of the UV light indicate that gases in some sections of the stream are in an excited state. Only a very energetic event, like a beam of radiation from an active galactic nucleus, could have done this, according to Bland-Hawthorn. This means that our own home galaxy had an active galactic nucleus phase in the past.

I think AGN flickering is what goes on for all of cosmic time, Bland-Hawthorn said. All galaxies are doing this, he said, like volcanoes that can lie quietly for long stretches of time but suddenly erupt.

Learning more about the central black hole of our galaxy is an exciting area of research, he added.

I think Sgr A* is the future of astrophysics, like searching for life signatures around planets, Bland-Hawthorn said. I am excited by what we will learn over the next 50 years.

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The Milky Way's supermassive black hole erupted with a violent flare - Astronomy Magazine

A cosmic linkAstronomers already know theres a close relationship between the size of a galaxy and the size of its supermassive black hole. That indicates the two somehow know about each other, despite the fact that the supermassive black hole is so much smaller than the galaxy around it.

You may imagine a giant black hole sucking in everything around it until the entire galaxy disappears like water down a drain, but thats simply impossible. Gravitys influence diminishes quickly as the distance between two objects increases. So, stars more than a few light-years away from the galaxys center arent ruled by the supermassive black holes presence at all, but instead by the mass of stars, gas, and dust around them.

A typical supermassive black hole only accretes, or sucks in, matter from a region just a few light-years across. And its gravity only influences the central few parsecs about 10 light-years or so, 1 parsec is 3.26 light-years of the galaxy.

And yet, the mass of a galaxys spheroid component its central bulge and the mass of its supermassive black hole are related. Theres also a link between the way stars in a galaxys bulge move and the mass of its supermassive black hole. What these relationships mean is that somehow, the galaxy at large and its supermassive black hole are connected. So, of course, astronomers want to know how.

But computer simulations can show galaxies and their black holes from start to finish, giving insight into whats happening. In fact, they can show thousands of galaxies, all growing and evolving over time.

Quinn and his colleagues used sophisticated code, called ROMULUS, to watch young galaxies evolve, looking at how much the supermassive black holes activity influenced the amount of star formation in the galaxy, and how the galaxys growth affected the black holes feeding habits. Their simulation included thousands of galaxies in various environments, from galaxy clusters to regions where galaxies are few and far between, exactly like the real universe.

Their work gives the clearest picture to date of how black holes and galaxies grow together, and shows that the two appear closely coupled, regardless of many of the factors that might disrupt their symbiosis. What this study shows is that the supermassive black hole and the stellar population of a galaxy grow together, Quinn said. The team found that no matter how many stars a galaxy was forming, only a small fraction of the gas available to make new stars was gobbled up by the central black hole instead.

And the fraction of gas consumed by the black hole, he said, stayed the same even in the face of factors the team thought might change it. The black hole had the same amount of food regardless of the number of nearby galaxies, how long the galaxy had to evolve, and even the number of other galaxies it had smashed into in the past. Thats interesting because galaxy interactions like flybys that happen in clusters such as the nearby Virgo Cluster and mergers such as the famous Antennae Galaxies can affect both star formation and black hole activity in galaxies.

The team also found that because that fraction of gas available to the black hole stays the same, galaxies and supermassive black holes have a relationship that is self-correcting. If the supermassive black hole starts out too large for its galaxy, a lack of available gas and dust in the galaxy appears to throttle down the black holes progress so it grows more slowly. Alternatively, if the black hole is small relative to its galaxy, plentiful gas and dust allows the black hole to grow at a faster rate, ultimately catching up to its host.

Of course, the results offer a generalized picture and some galaxies may not follow this template, especially as their central black holes go through periods of high activity, which most do. Quinn suggests that perhaps observing real galaxies at the extremes of the model, such as galaxies with very active black holes or dwarf galaxies with extremely heavy black holes, could help to confirm whether this model is a good fit for all, or if tweaks are needed under certain circumstances.

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How galaxies and their supermassive black holes grow together - Astronomy Magazine

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- An astronomer renowned for her work on the black hole at the center of our galaxy will deliver a free public lecture at Indiana University.

Andrea Ghez will present the 2019 Edmondson Lecture, "The Monster at the Heart of Our Galaxy," at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 16 in Rawles Hall, Room 100, on the IU Bloomington campus, followed by a reception. Ghez is the Lauren Leichtman and Arthur Levine Chair of Astrophysics at UCLA.

The event is free and open to the public. No registration is required.

Ghez's work uses the world's most powerful telescopes and next-generation imaging technology to peer into the heart of the Milky Way. Her groundbreaking work has provided the best evidence to date for the existence of the supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy. It also suggests that the center of most, if not all, other galaxies also harbor these massive objects in their core.

Earlier this year, Ghez's research led to the observation that our galaxy's central black hole -- named Sagittarius A -- has recently grown inexplicably "hungrier," consuming unusually large amounts of gas, dust and other interstellar debris, and flaring so brightly that astronomers briefly mistook it for a star.

During her lecture at IU, Ghez will explore the bizarre environment that surrounds this supermassive object -- which contains an estimated 4.3 million suns' worth of mass -- as well as discuss how her work tests Einstein's theory of relativity.

Ghez is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a recipient of both the 2008 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, commonly known as the "genius grant," and the 2012 Crafoord Prize from the Swedish Academy of Sciences. She holds a doctorate in astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology and a bachelor's degree in physics from MIT.

The annual F.K. Edmondson Astronomy Public Lectures were established to honor the memory of professor Frank Kelly Edmondson, a faculty member of the IU Bloomington Department of Astronomy from 1937 until his retirement in 1983, and chair of the department from 1944 until 1978. Edmondson is remembered not only for his contributions to the study of asteroids through the Indiana Asteroid Program but also for his dedication and service to IU and to the astronomical community. The Edmondson Lectures are endowed in Edmondson's honor by his family and friends.

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Famed astronomer to discuss supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy - IU Newsroom