Mountaineer Skies Blog

Pulsars, dead stars acting like giant lighthouses in space rotating so predictably that astronomers can use them as distant clocks far from the Earth. I'm Jackson Taylor, a graduate student here at WVU studying these objects, and I recently had the wonderful opportunity to visit Ann Arbor, Michigan to attend the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves or NANOGrav Fall meeting. NANOGrav is a group of pulsar astronomers and physicists working together to use pulsars to detect low-frequency gravitational waves permeating throughout our Milky Way galaxy. The combination of gravitational waves produced by sources spread throughout the Universe is called the gravitational wave background. In 2023, they found strong evidence that such a background exists and are avidly working to gather more evidence. They are even trying to determine what is creating this background.

In a few days, comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS (C/2023 A3) is expected to be visible to the naked eye right after sunset. As it moves away from the Sun, it will pass by the Earth on October 12, although at its closest approach it will be 44 million miles away.

April 8, 2024, a day that I’m calling WVU Astronomy Day, marked the last time Morgantown, West Virginia will see a solar eclipse of similar magnitude for the next two decades, and we at the WVU Planetarium made sure to make it count! Susie Paine and I, both graduate teaching assistants in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, planned a successful viewing party on the Mountainlair Green, behind the WVU Mountainlair Student Union. We started planning several months in advance. Susie and I also connected with several news and media outlets through interviews to help build interest in the eclipse and specifically the planetarium viewing party.

Recognized for their outstanding and invaluable service to the community and outreach efforts during the April 8th WVU Planetarium solar eclipse viewing event, Susie Paine and Jackson Taylor, were both awarded certificates of recognition from Congresswoman Carol Miller (R-WV). 

Experience the 2024 solar eclipse with the WVU Planetarium!

Though many different forms of planetariums have existed for centuries, the modern planetarium as we know it today using advanced technology was first developed one hundred years ago.

A growing community of astronomers across the world, including several at WVU, are coming together as a group called “Astronomers for Planet Earth” to say, “There is no ‘Planet B.’ We must take care of Earth.”

Stargazing experiences are getting harder and harder to find due to light pollution. Light pollution is the effect of artificial lights on the nighttime sky. It lightens the whole background of the sky, drowning out the dimmest stars and making it more di

The new dataset shows clear evidence of a background of gravitational waves that comes from massive objects in other galaxies moving through spacetime.

Astronomers are finding that different types of galaxies are more prevalent at different times during the history of the Universe. Hot DOG galaxies, or “hot dust-obscured” galaxies, are a special type of quasar.