Compton Gamma Ray Observatory

By Rick Smith

NASA's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) team has been awarded the American Astronomical Society's 2024 Bruno Rossi Prize in high-energy astronomy for helping "advance our understanding of particle acceleration and emission from astrophysical shocks, black holes and neutron stars."

Fifty years ago, on June 1, 1973, astronomers around the world were introduced to a powerful and perplexing new phenomenon called GRBs (gamma-ray bursts). Today sensors on orbiting satellites like NASA's Swift and Fermi missions detect a GRB somewhere in the sky about once a day on average. Astronomers think the bursts arise from catastrophic occurrences involving stars in distant galaxies, events thought to…

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope served the astronomy community well for 16 years. From its launch in 2003 to the end of its operations in January 2020, its infrared observations fueled scientific discoveries too numerous to list.

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory opened its powerful telescopic eye in orbit for the first time on Aug. 26, 1999. Over the next 25 years, Chandra has delivered nearly 25,000 observations of black holes, galaxy clusters, and other high-energy cosmic phenomena. And Chandra isn't done yet.

The Chandra X-ray Observatory faces a premature end under new funding cuts proposed by NASA—and astronomers aren't happy

Surprise: the Moon outshines the Sun at the highest energies. Across all wavelengths of light, the Sun is brighter than the Moon. Until we went to the highest energies, and saw a gamma-ray surprise..

Before the Marvel Cinematic Universe brought all of our favorite heroes into one shared (but increasingly fractured) reality, we had to be satisfied with...

Exposure to gamma radiation might be a little more common than we previously thought, thanks to dark lightning.

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To mark the 25th anniversary of Chandra X-ray, new sonifications of three images – including Cassiopeia A (Cas A) – are being released.

The most powerful events in the known universe – gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) – are short-lived outbursts of the highest-energy light. They can erupt with a quintillion (a 10 followed by 18 zeros) times the luminosity of our Sun. Now thought to announce the births of new black holes, they were discovered by accident. The backstory […]

From views of Mars to glimpses of distant galaxies, from the Perseverance rover to the James Webb Space Telescope, here are 60 of the best space photos.

A new NASA policy makes it unlikely future missions will be named after individuals in response to the controversy surrounding the naming of JWST.

MIT Professor Deepto Chakrabarty has been named as the new head of the MIT Department of Physics.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of its launch, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is releasing 25 never-before-seen views of a wide range of cosmic

People often think about archaeology happening deep in jungles or inside ancient pyramids. However, a team of astronomers has shown that they can use stars

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Chandra team has released a set of 25 new images of cosmic objects and phenomena.

The Chandra X-ray Observatory marked its 25th anniversary with a release of never-before-seen images. But budget cuts may cause the observatory's days to be ...

From radar instruments smaller than a shoebox to radiometers the size of a milk carton, there are more tools available to scientists today for observing complex Earth systems than ever before. But this abundance of available sensors creates its own unique challenge: how can researchers organize these diverse instruments in the most efficient way for field campaigns and science missions?