A novel instrument that has already proven its mettle on field campaigns will attempt to measure atmospheric greenhouse gases from an occultation-viewing, low-Earth-orbiting CubeSat mission called Mini-Carb early next year—marking the first time this type of instrument has flown in space.

Like a game of “hide and seek,” Lawrence Livermore astrophysicists know that there are black holes hiding in the Milky Way, just not where.

About twenty-five percent of young stars in our galaxy form in clustered environments, and stars in a cluster are often close enough to each other to affect the way they accrete gas and grow. Astronomers trying to understand the details of star formation, for example the relative abundance of massive stars to low mass ones, must take such complicated clustering effects into account. Measuring the actual demographics of a cluster is not easy either.

A team of scientists from the Faculty of Physics and Sternberg State Astronomical Institute, MSU, leading an international collaboration with members from Europe, Chile, the U.S. and Australia discovered a supermassive black hole in the center of the Fornax galaxy. The results of the research were published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal.