maser Archives

January 11, 2023January 11, 2023 by Evan Gough

This Star is Blasting Out a Concentrated Jet of Material at 500 km/s

A team of astronomers was studying the masers around oddball star MWC 349A when they discovered something unexpected: a previously unseen jet of material launching from the star’s gas disk at impossibly high speeds. Image Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), M. Weiss (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

MWC 349A is a star about 3,900 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. It’s huge, about 38 times as massive as the Sun. It’s actually a binary star and may even be a triple star. It’s an oddball and one of the brightest sources of radio emission in the sky.

One of the star’s unusual features is its natural maser. MWC 349A’s natural maser played a central role in a new discovery: the young star emits a blistering jet of material travelling at 500 km/sec (310 m/sec.) That discovery could help astronomers understand massive stars and their complexity.

June 15, 2020June 15, 2020 by Brian Koberlein

Evidence is Building that the Standard Model of the Expansion of the Universe Needs some new Ideas

Artist's conception illustrating a disk of water-bearing gas orbiting the supermassive black hole at the core of a distant galaxy. Credit: Sophia Dagnello, NRAO/AUI/NSF

Once again a new measurement of cosmic expansion is encouraging astronomers to reconsider the standard cosmological model. The problem is the Hubble constant and dark energy. While we have a broad understanding of dark energy, pinning down the value of the Hubble constant has been a problem, since different measurements keep getting different results. Now a new study has been published which further complicates things.