Assembling an Image of the Shadow of a Black Hole

In a mind-boggling excerpt from Seth Fletcher’s book Einstein’s Shadow: A Black Hole, a Band of Astronomers, and the Quest to See the Unseeable (published by Ecco), the author probes the meticulous process behind the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). In fact, a series of collaborative data sets collected in 2017 by eight telescopes around the planet, the EHT aims to create an image of the shadow of a …

Some Recently Discovered Moons of Jupiter are Weirder Than Others

Scott Sheppard’s astronomy division at the Carnegie Institution for Science hunts for objects in very distant parts of our Solar System. Sometimes, however, they’re able to scour areas closer—depending on the orbit of planets intersecting with their work. When the latter scenario arose with Jupiter, Sheppard and his colleagues discovered 10 new moons—bringing the grand total of satellite bodies to 79. A few of these …