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Canadian astronomers and facilities have had a significant impact in wide-field astronomy. With community planning exercises underway this looks set to continue, with new capabilities and international collaborations in the near future.
Harry Cliff, a particle physicist, a Fellow of Modern Science at the Science Museum in London and the main curator of The Sun: Living with our Star, discusses the exhibition with Nature Astronomy.
The surface of Mars has been well mapped and characterized, yet the subsurface — the most likely place to find signs of extant or extinct life and a repository of useful resources for human exploration — remains unexplored. In the near future this is set to change.
The masses of supermassive black holes, key to many cosmological studies, are highly uncertain beyond our local Universe. The main challenge is to establish the spatial and kinematic structure of the broad-line emitting gas in active galactic nuclei.
Palomar Gattini-IR is the first of a number of infrared transient surveyors that will search the skies nightly, looking for ephemeral phenomena such as novae, supernovae and neutron star merger events, explain Co-lead Researchers Anna Moore and Mansi Kasliwal.
Black holes have the distinct honour of being the most popular and potentially the least well-understood objects in the Universe. This issue’s Insight explores how far black hole research has come since its inception, though it still has a long way to go.
The detection of a gravitational-wave background at nanohertz frequencies can tell us if and how supermassive black holes merge, and inform our knowledge of galaxy merger rates and supermassive black hole masses. All we have to do is time pulsars.
Mitchell C. Begelman, Professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder and a black hole expert, discusses the start of the field with Nature Astronomy.
Intermediate-mass black holes (BHs) in local dwarf galaxies are considered the relics of the early seed BHs. However, their growth might have been impacted by galaxy mergers and BH feedback so that they cannot be treated as tracers of the early seed BH population.
