News – Page 6 – Space Research Initiative

M87* One Year Later: Proof of a Persistent Black Hole Shadow

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration has released new images of M87*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, using data from observations taken in April 2018.

With the participation of the newly commissioned Greenland Telescope and a dramatically improved recording rate across the array, the 2018 observations give researchers a view of the source independent from the first observations in 2017.

https://news.gatech.edu/news/2024/01/18/m87-one-year-later-proof-persistent-black-hole-shadow

Water on the Moon May Be Forming Due to Electrons From Earth

Scientists have discovered that electrons from Earth may be contributing to the formation of water on the Moon’s surface. The research, published in Nature Astronomy, has the potential to impact our understanding of how water — a critical resource for life and sustained future human missions to Earth’s moon — formed and continues to evolve on the lunar surface.

“Understanding how water is made on the Moon will help us understand how water was made in the early solar system and how water inevitably was brought to Earth,” says Thom Orlando, Regents’ Professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry with a joint appointment in the School of Physics, who played a critical role in the discovery alongside Brant Jones, a research scientist in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech.

https://news.gatech.edu/news/2023/11/09/water-moon-may-be-forming-due-electrons-earth

Physicists Focus on Neutrinos With New Telescope

Georgia Tech scientists will soon have another way to search for neutrinos, those hard-to-detect, high-energy particles speeding through the cosmos that hold clues to massive particle accelerators in the universe — if researchers can find them.

“The detection of a neutrino source or even a single neutrino at the highest energies is like finding a holy grail,” says Professor Nepomuk Otte, the principal investigator for the Trinity Demonstrator telescope that was recently built by his group and collaborators, and was designed to detect neutrinos after they get stopped within the Earth.

https://news.gatech.edu/news/2023/11/16/physicists-focus-neutrinos-new-telescope