by Betsy Mills | Jan 23, 2013 | Daily Paper Summaries
Unlike its candy bar namesake, the center of our Milky Way Galaxy is not actually a very pleasant place to be. There’s a supermassive central black hole to deal with, intense radiation from a population of massive stars, and hot clouds of molecular gas. In this paper, the authors use observations of three molecular spectral lines to measure the temperatures of these gas clouds in the center of the Galaxy, and find that the processes heating the clouds may not be what you expect!
by Alice Olmstead | Jan 22, 2013 | Daily Paper Summaries
Carretti and collaborators have found new evidence that the gigantic bubbles of emission emanating from the center of our Milky Way are the result of winds from supernova explosions, not jets from our supermassive black hole.
by Betsy Mills | Jan 1, 2013 | Daily Paper Summaries
Everything in our galaxy is moving– you, the earth underneath you, the sun, other stars– everything. However, it turns out that figuring out how fast some of these things are moving is surprisingly difficult, and can have Galactic-sized implications!
by Nick Ballering | Dec 24, 2012 | Daily Paper Summaries
Resolved images of debris disks with Herschel reveal their true sizes, and test the assumptions used in unresolved observations.
by Nick Hand | Dec 23, 2012 | Daily Paper Summaries
The authors investigate the fraction of massive galaxies at z ~ 2 that contains an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN), in hopes of understanding the importance of AGN in quenching star formation.
by Allison Strom | Dec 16, 2012 | Daily Paper Summaries
Using new data from the MOSFIRE spectrograph, the authors of this paper test the ability of classic emission line diagnostics to separate star formation activity from supermassive black hole accretion at high redshift. What they find may be important for understanding how the growth galaxies and black holes affect one another over cosmic time.
