NICER – Astronomy Now

Seeing beyond the horizon of a space-warping pulsar

15 December 2019 Astronomy Now

The NICER telescope array aboard the International Space Station has made the most accurate measurements yet of a pulsar’s mass and size.

NICER spots thermonuclear flash from pulsar detonation

8 November 2019 Astronomy Now

The NICER X-ray telescope array aboard the International Space Station has witnessed a brilliant Type 1 X-ray burst from a pulsar 11,000 light years away.

Best view yet of flickering jets in black hole feeding frenzy

13 October 2019 Astronomy Now

Astronomers capture the most detailed view yet of the titanic flickers and millisecond flashes generated by material swirling around a black hole.

Space station instrument fills in blanks about binary pulsar

14 May 2018 Astronomy Now

An instrument aboard the International Space Station has detected a binary star system made up of a fast-spinning pulsar and a compact white dwarf that orbit each other every 38 minutes, a record for an accreting millisecond X-ray pulsar.

Experiment devoted to neutron star research installed on space station

19 June 2017 Stephen Clark

A NASA instrument built to help astronomers learn about the structure and behaviour of neutron stars, super-dense stellar skeletons left behind by massive explosions, has been mounted to an observation post outside the International Space Station after delivery aboard a SpaceX supply ship earlier this month.

Astronomers identify a new class of medium-sized black holes

21 September 2015 Astronomy Now

Nearly all black holes come in one of two sizes: stellar mass black holes that weigh up to a few dozen times the mass of our Sun, or supermassive black holes ranging from a million to several billion times the Sun’s mass. A team led by astronomers at the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has found evidence for a new intermediate-mass black hole about 5,000 times the mass of our star.