VLA

“If... then my old theory is completely toast,” says astrophysicist Steinn Sigurdsson of Pennsylvania State University. “This is a really nice piece of work.” Nice Nature paper coming out tomorrow by Jay Strader et al on a pair of flat spectrum ultra-faint radio sources in the core of M22. The sources are consistent with being ~ 20 solar mass black holes, accreting at a low rate from, well, something. Maybe... Best candidates yet in the Milky Way globulars. M22 has a somewhat unusual structure (massive fluffy core) in a way that several authors have suggested might be a signature of black…
The author, dishing. To get to the National Radio Telescope Observatory, you have to be committed. Well, first, you have to be in New Mexico -- about an hour's drive south of Albuquerque, in the plains of San Augustin, to be precise, a Pleistocene lakebed bordered by the northern end of the Chihuahuan Desert and dotted with arid shrubs. Despite being some 6,970 feet above sea level, it feels like the basement of the world, wide and flat and under the massive Southwestern sky. Driving to the Observatory, the home of the famous "Very Large Array" of radio telescopes, is an exercise in…