‘Unicorn’ Discovery Points to a New Population of Black Holes
Almost a decade ago, Feryal Özel and her colleagues noticed something odd. While a variety of possible black holes had been found in our galaxy, none...
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NASA’s Hubble Sees Unexplained Brightness from Colossal Explosion
Neutron-Star Collision Releases Puzzling Burst of Infrared Light Long ago and far across the universe, an enormous burst of gamma rays unleashed more energy...
Growing Library of Educational Brochures by CIERA Astronomers
A new educational brochure series has debuted from CIERA, highlighting various topics in astrophysics research at Northwestern. The brochures are written in publicly accessible...
Black hole ‘family portrait’ is most detailed to date
Above banner illustration generated by a computer model shows multiple black holes found within the heart of a dense globular star cluster. Credit: Aaron...
2020 Midwest Relativity Meeting Blue Apple Awarded to Lindsay DeMarchi
Graduate student Lindsay DeMarchi won the Blue Apple award at the 2020 Midwest Relativity Meeting for her talk “Multi Messenger Observations of TZOs”. A...
CIERA Welcomes New Faculty Members Ryan Chornock and Daniel Lecoanet
This fall, we are excited to welcome Ryan Chornock and Daniel Lecoanet to CIERA as two new astrophysics faculty members. Ryan Chornock joins as...
Scientists detect first-of-its-kind ‘intermediate-mass‘ black hole
Numerical simulation of two black holes that inspiral and merge, emitting gravitational waves. Credit: N. Fischer, H. Pfeiffer, A. Buonanno, and the SXS Collaboration...
Do Short Gamma-ray Bursts Produce Magnetars? Radio Observations Say: Probably Not
The Milky Way Galaxy seen over the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array west of Socorro, New Mexico. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, Jeff Hellerman A group...
New Mystery Merger Detected by LIGO-Virgo
Image Credit: LIGO/Caltech/MIT/R. Hurt (IPAC) In August of 2019, the LIGO-Virgo gravitational-wave network witnessed the merger of a black hole with 23 times the...
Using Gravitational Waves to Approximate Pi
Image Credit: Igor Sokalski Getty Images At least 3,700 years ago, Babylonian mathematicians approximated the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. They...
NASA Einstein Postdoc Kate Alexander Named to Crain’s “20 in Their Twenties”
CIERA researcher Kate Alexander is featured in Crain’s “20 in Their Twenties” for 2020. She earned a doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics at Harvard...
Astronomers Find First-Ever Collision of Black Holes With a Strange Mass Discrepancy
Just over a year ago, on 12 April 2019, the LIGO-Virgo collaboration made a detection of gravitational waves, rippling out across space-time from...