December 18, 2015 The Skeleton of the Milky Way Science Update Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is a typical barred spiral galaxy, a flattened disk of about a hundred billion stars, gas, and dust that is roughly one hundred thousand light-years in diameter.

December 3, 2015 Event Horizon Telescope Reveals Magnetic Fields at Milky Way's Central Black Hole News Release: smithsonianscience.si.edu "For the first time, astronomers have detected magnetic fields just outside the event horizon of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy."

September 10, 2015 Comedy Central: Drunk History: New Jersey: Sound In Space Time: 5:20
This is a short comedy clip introducing Bob Wilson and Arno Penzias during the early days of discovering cosmic microwave background radiation in New Jersey.
NOTE: This is Comedy Central .. viewer discretion advised.  
Video Clip ...

September 8, 2015 "Things That Go Bump in the Night: The Violent Universe"
talk by Dr. Geoffrey Bower New Release: www.bigislandnow.com Dr. Bower is the Chief Scientist for Hawaii Operations for the Academica Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

August 28, 2015 Imaging Lensed, Distant Galaxies with the Large Millimeter Telescope Science Update Where does it all come from? A breakthrough came with the discovery of a large population of sources very bright at submillimeter wavelengths at large cosmic distances.

June 26, 2015 The Discovery of the Molecule Si-C-Si in Space Science Update The space between stars is not empty -- it contains a vast reservoir of diffuse material with about 5-10% of the total mass of our Milky Way galaxy. Most of the material is gas, but about 1% of this mass (quite a lot in astronomical terms) takes the form of tiny dust grains made predominantly of silicates (sand is also silicates), although grains can also be composed of carbon and other elements.

June 12, 2015 The Physical Properties of Dense Molecular Clouds Science Update Small, dense interstellar clouds of gas and dust, containing hundreds to thousands of solar-masses of material, are suspected of being the precursors to stars and stellar clusters.

June 8, 2015 Black Hole Hunters News Release: www.nytimes.com Aiming to make the first portrait of the hungry monster at the center of our galaxy, astronomers built "a telescope as big as the world."

May 1, 2015 An Improved Model for Star Formation Science Update Star formation, once thought to consist essentially of just the simple coalescence of material by gravity, actually occurs in a complex series of stages.

April 10, 2015 Merging Stars Science Update Astronomers have known for decades that the merger of two normal stars is a frequent and astronomically important phenomenon.

April 1, 2015 Astronomy Photo of the Day: 4/1/15 - T G0.253+0.016 News Release: www.futurism.com "To determine whether the cloud contained clumps of denser gas, called dense cores, the team used the Submillimeter Array (SMA), a collection of eight radio telescopes on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii."

March 30, 2015 As Stars Form, Magnetic Fields Influence Regions Big and Small News Release Stars form when gravity pulls together material within giant clouds of gas and dust. But gravity isn't the only force at work. Both turbulence and magnetic fields battle gravity, either by stirring things up or by channeling and restricting gas flows, respectively. New research focusing on magnetic fields shows that they influence star formation on a variety of scales, from hundreds of light-years down to a fraction of a light-year.

March 27, 2015An Efficient Star Making Galaxy Science Update New stars regularly appear in the night sky as the gas and dust in giant interstellar clouds gradually coalesce under the influence of gravity.

March 23, 2015 Colliding Stars Explain Enigmatic Seventeenth Century Explosion News Release: www.eso.org New observations made with APEX and other telescopes reveal that the star that European astronomers saw appear in the sky in 1670 was not a nova, but a much rarer, violent breed of stellar collision.

March 19, 2015 More than a million stars are forming in a mysterious dusty gas cloud in a nearby galaxy News Release: www.phys.org "The star cluster is buried within a supernebula in a dwarf galaxy known as NGC 5253, in the constellation Centaurus. The cluster has one billion times the luminosity of our sun, but is invisible in ordinary light, hidden by its own hot gases."

February 13, 2015 Embryos of Stars Science Update Stars like the Sun begin their lives as cold, dense cores of dust and gas that gradually collapse under the influence of gravity until nuclear fusion is ignited.