The African Connection
The African continent will soon host a number of massive astronomy projects. Today we’ll look at two collaborations that are helping to bring out the continent’s requisite human potential.
Observing the inner workings of star formation
The common picture of star formation includes the gravitational collapse of cores within molecular clouds, with mass accreting either directly or via a disk. An important aspect of the model is that some component must lower the angular momentum of the accreting material. By observing infalling envelopes, especially at different stages of star formation, the mechanism for mass accretion can be studied.
Shadow of a Black Hole
Messier 87 (M87) is a giant elliptical galaxy that is best known for its spectacular, 5000-ly-long jet. In this paper, the authors develop models of M87 based on general relativistic numerical simulations and make predictions for the future direct observations of the black hole event horizon that may be possible.
The Moving Bits
With increasingly large data sets and surveys, the problem of moving astronomical data around the world is non-trivial, but how fast and how accurately can this be done?