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#PulsarWeek: NICER Ask Me Anything! – Part 2

  • By Barb Mattson
  • August 16, 2017
  • Comments Off on #PulsarWeek: NICER Ask Me Anything! – Part 2

On August 7, 2017, as the grande finale to #PulsarWeek, members of the recently-launched Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) mission team sat down for an hour to answer questions about the mission, pulsars, space navigation, and even more off-the-wall topics in a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) event. We’ve … Continue Reading →

NICER AMA team

#PulsarWeek: NICER Ask Me Anything! – Part 1

  • By Sara Mitchell
  • August 16, 2017
  • Comments Off on #PulsarWeek: NICER Ask Me Anything! – Part 1

On August 7, 2017, as the grande finale to #PulsarWeek, members of the recently-launched Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) mission team sat down for an hour to answer questions about the mission, pulsars, space navigation, and even more off-the-wall topics in a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) event. We’ve … Continue Reading →

Dr. Jocelyn Bell Burnell

#PulsarWeek: The women who study pulsars

  • By Sara Mitchell
  • August 6, 2017
  • Comments Off on #PulsarWeek: The women who study pulsars

For the past week, we have been celebrating #PulsarWeek on social media in honor of the 50th anniversary of the discovery of pulsars. For more on the discovery itself, and about some of the researchers currently studying pulsars in NASA Goddard’s Astrophysics Science Division, here’s a guest blog from Goddard … Continue Reading →

millisecond pulsar visualizaiton

RXTE’s Greatest Pulsar Hits

A pulsar is the crushed core of an exploded star, a rapidly spinning cinder that repeatedly swings a beam of light in our direction. Check out the post “Lighthouses in Space” for more about what pulsars are, how they work and why we study them. On the eve of the … Continue Reading →

Bringing Astrophysics to YouTube: An Interview with Jessica Few

  • By Sara Mitchell
  • November 22, 2013
  • Comments Off on Bringing Astrophysics to YouTube: An Interview with Jessica Few

Earlier this year, Blueshift contributor Koji Mukai sent us a link to a series of astronomy videos produced by Jessica Few, a student at Durham University in the UK. We loved the videos, and knew we wanted to share them… and find out a bit more about Jessica and her … Continue Reading →

A composite image of the Crab Nebula showing the X-ray (blue), and optical (red) images superimposed. The size of the X-ray image is smaller because the higher energy X-ray emitting electrons radiate away their energy more quickly than the lower energy optically emitting electrons as they move. Credit: Optical: NASA/HST/ASU/J. Hester et al. X-Ray: NASA/CXC/ASU/J. Hester et al.

Lighthouses in Space

Since pulsars are something we study here in the Astrophysics Science Division at NASA, and we know it’s a topic people are always curious about, we interviewed astrophysicist Dr. Tod Strohmayer to ask him all about them. Blueshift: What’s a pulsar? Would you say they look sort of like lighthouses … Continue Reading →

RXTE, Black holes, and Pulsars - Oh My!

RXTE, Black holes, and Pulsars – Oh My!

Black holes and pulsars are two of the most mysterious (and coolest-sounding) cosmic objects – and we study both of them here at the Astrophysics Science Division. Here is Blueshift’s inside look at two recent discoveries made using data from the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (which I personally like to … Continue Reading →

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