Twisted Physics: Astronomers Solve 30-Year-Old Stellar Mystery

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wisted Physics: Astronomers Solve 30-Year-Old Stellar Mystery

This artist's illustration shows the twisted, funnel-shaped magnetic field (represented by white spiral lines) that ALMA detected wrapped around the gas outflow streaming from a young star embedded in the NGC 1333 IRAS 4A. New data revealed this ring-shaped structure in unprecedented detail, confirming a decades-old prediction of how magnetic fields launch and shape powerful jets from young stars. redit: NSF/AUI/NSF NRAO/M. Weiss. Hi-Res File

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ALMA Observations of a Protostars’ Twisted Outflow Finally Shows the Magnetic Fields Scientists Predicted — But Couldn’t Prove

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), of which the U.S. National Science Foundation National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NSF NRAO) is a partner, have captured the first direct, high-resolution images of a magnetic field wrapped tightly around the outflow of gas streaming away from a forming star — evidence that solves a decades-old puzzle about how young stars sculpt the powerful jets that form them.

The findings, from a research team led by Tao-Chung Ching, a former Jansky Fellow at the NSF NRAO, focus on NGC 1333 IRAS 4A, a young double-star system embedded in the Perseus molecular cloud, roughly 960 light-years from Earth.

An “invisible magnetic funnel” made visible by ALMA

Newborn stars grow by pulling in gas and dust from a surrounding disk of material. As they do, they also blast some of that material back out into space in fast, narrow jets and wider, slower outflows — a process astronomers have long suspected is shaped and powered by magnetic fields twisted into a funnel-like, doughnut shape around the jet.

“For the first time, these ALMA observations have captured this invisible funnel of magnetic fields,” said Ching, “This is exciting because it proves a decades-old theory about how stars, like our own Sun, are born and fire off powerful cosmic jets.”

The team used ALMA’s exceptional resolving power, roughly 30 times sharper than that of earlier telescopes, to measure the faint polarization of carbon monoxide gas radiating from the outflow around IRAS 4A. That polarization signal let the researchers trace the morphology and strength of the magnetic field threading through the outflow at distances of only a few hundred astronomical units (the average distance between the Earth to the Sun) from the young star.

The team found the magnetic field measured a few thousandths of a gauss (modest compared to a household magnet, but immense on the scale of interstellar space) and that it wrapped around the outflow like a coil, running perpendicular to the direction the gas was flowing and matching the outflow’s rotation. That geometry is the signature of a “toroidal” (or donut-shaped) magnetic field, exactly what theoretical models have predicted for decades — but never directly confirmed at this level of detail.

“This study represents the first and most high-resolution observation of milligauss-strength toroidal magnetic fields at a scale of several hundred astronomical units from a protostar,” adds Ching.

“We knew that IRAS 4A was a textbook case: 20 years ago, in a work published in Science in 2006, we found that this region followed the theoretically expected magnetically driven collapse”, says Josep Miquel Girart, co-author and researcher at the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC) and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC).

A new tool for mapping magnetic fields

The team also uncovered an unexpected bonus: a straightforward mathematical relationship, based on the physics principle known as Ampère’s law, linking the twisting of the magnetic field to the electric currents flowing through the gas. Because that relationship follows a predictable, linear pattern, it gives astronomers a new and more direct way to work out the direction of magnetic fields in the clouds of gas and dust where stars are born — a notoriously difficult measurement to make.

Understanding how magnetic fields shape stellar outflows helps astronomers explain a fundamental step in star formation, for how young stars shed excess material and angular momentum so they can continue growing, rather than spinning themselves apart. The same physical process is thought to play out at vastly different scales throughout the Universe, from newborn stars like the one studied here, to the supermassive black holes that power distant galaxies.

Source: National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)/News

Scientific Paper

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About ALMA

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international partnership of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan, together with NRC (Canada), NSTC (Taiwan), ASIAA (Taiwan), and KASI (Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile, is located on the Chajnantor plateau in northern Chile. ALMA is operated by ESO, the Associated Universities, Inc./National Radio Astronomy Observatory (AUI/NRAO), and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ).

About NRAO

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the U.S. National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

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A chemically rich outflow from a young Sun-like star: A new laboratory for shock chemistry

During the early stages of star formation, material is ejected at high speed from near the forming star forming a bipolar structure referred to as protostellar outflow. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

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A study led by the Center for Astrochemical Studies (CAS) at MPE has revealed an unexpectedly rich chemical inventory in the outflow of the young, Sun-like protostar IRAS 4B1, located about 300 parsecs away in the star-forming region NGC 1333 in the Perseus molecular cloud. So far, there is only one low-mass protostellar outflow in which emission of complex organic molecules has been studied extensively, making IRAS 4B1 a rare and valuable laboratory for exploring how these molecules behave under extreme conditions.

One of the central questions in astrochemistry is how simple interstellar molecules grow into more complex species during the process of star and planet formation. As these processes unfold over millions of years, astronomers rely on snapshots of many systems at different evolutionary stages, using comparisons with theoretical models to trace the chemical evolution.

Protostellar outflows offer a unique window into these transformations. In the earliest stages of star formation, material is ejected from the young forming star at high speed. When this gas collides with the surrounding cloud, it generates shock waves that compress and briefly heat the gas and dust, rapidly altering the chemistry. These shocks can release complex organic molecules - defined as carbon-bearing species containing at least six atoms - that were previously frozen onto dust grains, injecting a burst of rich chemistry into the surrounding region.

Despite their importance, such detections are rare. “While working on a separate PRODIGE project mapping methyl cyanide (CH₃CN) toward IRAS 4B1, I noticed emission that appeared to trace the outflow rather than the hot surroundings of the forming star,” says Laura Busch, a postdoctoral researcher at MPE who led the study. “This made me search the data for more complex molecules – and I found them.”

The PRODIGE observations, carried out with the Northern Extended Millimeter Array (NOEMA), reveal a surprisingly diverse chemical composition in the outflow. “The combination of high sensitivity and broad spectral coverage makes PRODIGE ideally suited to this kind of study,” adds Jaime Pineda, scientist at MPE. “It allows us to detect and map multiple complex molecules simultaneously — something that would otherwise be extremely difficult.”

Maps of molecular emission show that different molecules trace distinct regions within the outflow, indicating variations in temperature and density. Some species are brightest where temperatures are highest, while others originate in cooler zones, reflecting different chemical pathways. These findings provide fresh insight into how complex organic molecules — the precursors of prebiotic chemistry — are processed by shocks during the earliest phases of star formation.

Source: Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE)/Paper of the Month

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The PROtostars & DIsks: Global Evolution (PRODIGE; PIs: P. Caselli and Th. Henning) is a collaboration between the Max Planck Society and the Institut de Radioastromie Millimétrique (IRAM) located in France. The project targeted a total of 30 Class 0/I protostellar systems in the Perseus molecular cloud, with the main goal of studying the kinematics of star formation. The observations cover a broad spectral bandwidth of 16GHz, a unique treat of the NOrthern Extended Millimeter Array (NOEMA) located in the French Alpes and run by IRAM that was used to observe the data, is essential for identifying molecules and study their emission spectra.

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Contacts:

Dr. Laura Busch
Post-Doc
lbusch@mpe.mpg.de
Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching
Center for Astrochemical Studies

Dr. Jaime Pineda Fornerod
Scientist
Tel: +49 (0)89 30000-3610
Fax: +49 (0)89 30000-3950
jpineda@mpe.mpg.de
Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching
Center for Astrochemical Studies

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Publication

L. A. Busch, J. E. Pineda, P. Caselli, D. M. Segura-Cox, S. Narayanan, C. Gieser, M. J. Maureira, T.-H. Hsieh, Y. Lin, M. T. Valdivia-Mena, L. Bouscasse, Th. Henning, D. Semenov, A. Fuente, Y.-R. Chou, L. Mason, P. C. Cortés, L. W. Looney, I. W. Stephens, M. Tafalla, A. Dutrey, W. Kwon, P. Saha

PRODIGE - envelope to disk with NOEMA: VII. (Complex) organic molecules in the NGC1333 IRAS4B1 outflow: A new laboratory for shock chemistry

arXiv

Source | DOI

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Webb peeks into Perseus

A nebula made up of cloudy gas and dust in the form of soft and wispy clouds and, in the centre, thin and highly detailed layers pressed close together. Large, bright stars surrounded by six long points of light are dotted over the image, as well as some small, point-like stars embedded in the clouds. The clouds are lit up in blue close to the stars; orange colours show clouds that glow in infrared light. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Scholz, K. Muzic, A. Langeveld, R. Jayawardhana

This stunning new mosaic of images from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope showcases the nearby star-forming cluster, NGC 1333. The nebula is in the Perseus molecular cloud, and located approximately 960 light-years away.

Webb’s superb sensitivity allows astronomers to investigate young objects with extremely low masses. Some of the faintest ‘stars’ in the picture are in fact newly born free-floating brown dwarfs with masses comparable to those of giant planets.

The same cluster was featured as the 33rd anniversary image of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope in April 2023. Hubble’s image just scratched the surface of this region, because clouds of dust obscure much of the star formation process. Observing with larger aperture and in the infrared part of the spectrum, Webb is capable of peering through the dusty veil to reveal newborn stars, brown dwarfs and planetary mass objects.

The centre of the image presents a deep peek into the heart of the NGC1333 cloud. Across the image we see large patches of orange, which represent gas glowing in the infrared. These so-called Herbig-Haro objects form when ionised material ejected from young stars collides with the surrounding cloud. They are hallmarks of a very active site of star formation.

Many of the young stars in this image are surrounded by disks of gas and dust, which may eventually produce planetary systems. Similar to the young stars in this mosaic, our own Sun and planets formed inside a dusty molecular cloud, 4.6 billion years ago. Our Sun did not form in isolation but as part of a cluster, which was perhaps even more massive than NGC 1333. The cluster in the mosaic, only 1-3 million years old, presents us with an opportunity to study stars like our Sun, as well as brown dwarfs and free-floating planets, in their nascent stages.

The images were captured as part of the Webb observation programme 1202 (PI: A. Scholz) to survey a large portion of NGC 1333. These data constitute the first deep spectroscopic survey of the young cluster, and have identified brown dwarfs down to planetary masses using the observatory’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS). The first results from this survey have been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal.

Source: ESA

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Licence
CC BY 4.0 INT or ESA Standard Licence
(content can be used under either licence)

Space Science

JWST | Webb

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New Evidence That All Stars Are Born in Pairs

Radio image of a very young binary star system, less than about 1 million years old, that formed within a dense core (oval outline) in the Perseus molecular cloud. All stars likely form as binaries within dense cores. Credit:SCUBA-2 survey image by Sarah Sadavoy, CfA

A radio image of a triple star system forming within a dusty disk in the Perseus molecular cloud obtained by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. Credit: Bill Saxton, ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), NRAO/AUI/NSF

This infrared image from the Hubble Space Telescope contains a bright, fan-shaped object (lower right quadrant) thought to be a binary star that emits light pulses as the two stars interact. The primitive binary system is located in the IC 348 region of the Perseus molecular cloud and was included in the study by the Berkeley/Harvard team. Credit: NASA, ESA and J. Muzerolle, STScI

A dark molecular cloud, Barnard 68, is filled with gas and dust that block the light from stars forming inside as well as stars and galaxies located behind it. These and other stellar nurseries, like the Perseus molecular cloud, can only be probed by radio waves. Credit: FORS Team, 8.2-meter VLT Antu, ESO

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Cambridge, MA -Did our Sun have a twin when it was born 4.5 billion years ago?

Almost certainly yes -- though not an identical twin. And so did every other Sun-like star in the universe, according to a new analysis by a theoretical physicist from the University of California, Berkeley, and a radio astronomer from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Harvard University.

Many stars have companions, including our nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, a triplet system. Astronomers have long sought an explanation. Are binary and triplet star systems born that way? Did one star capture another? Do binary stars sometimes split up and become single stars?

Astronomers have even searched for a companion to our Sun, a star dubbed Nemesis because it was supposed to have kicked an asteroid into Earth’s orbit that collided with our planet and exterminated the dinosaurs. It has never been found.

The new assertion is based on a radio survey of a giant molecular cloud filled with recently formed stars in the constellation Perseus, and a mathematical model that can explain the Perseus observations only if all Sun-like stars are born with a companion.

"We are saying, yes, there probably was a Nemesis, a long time ago," said co-author Steven Stahler, a UC Berkeley research astronomer.

"We ran a series of statistical models to see if we could account for the relative populations of young single stars and binaries of all separations in the Perseus molecular cloud, and the only model that could reproduce the data was one in which all stars form initially as wide binaries. These systems then either shrink or break apart within a million years."

In this study, "wide" means that the two stars are separated by more than 500 astronomical units, or AU, where one astronomical unit is the average distance between the Sun and Earth (93 million miles). A wide binary companion to our Sun would have been 17 times farther from the Sun than its most distant planet today, Neptune.

Based on this model, the Sun's sibling most likely escaped and mixed with all the other stars in our region of the Milky Way galaxy, never to be seen again.

"The idea that many stars form with a companion has been suggested before, but the question is: how many?" said first author Sarah Sadavoy, a NASA Hubble fellow at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. "Based on our simple model, we say that nearly all stars form with a companion. The Perseus cloud is generally considered a typical low-mass star-forming region, but our model needs to be checked in other clouds."

The idea that all stars are born in a litter has implications beyond star formation, including the very origins of galaxies, Stahler said.

Stahler and Sadavoy posted their findings in April on the arXiv and is available online. Their paper has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Stars Birthed in 'Dense Cores'

Astronomers have speculated about the origins of binary and multiple star systems for hundreds of years, and in recent years have created computer simulations of collapsing masses of gas to understand how they condense under gravity into stars. They have also simulated the interaction of many young stars recently freed from their gas clouds. Several years ago, one such computer simulation by Pavel Kroupa of the University of Bonn led him to conclude that all stars are born as binaries.

Yet direct evidence from observations has been scarce. As astronomers look at younger and younger stars, they find a greater proportion of binaries, but why is still a mystery.

"The key here is that no one looked before in a systematic way at the relation of real young stars to the clouds that spawn them," Stahler said. "Our work is a step forward in understanding both how binaries form and also the role that binaries play in early stellar evolution. We now believe that most stars, which are quite similar to our own Sun, form as binaries. I think we have the strongest evidence to date for such an assertion."

According to Stahler, astronomers have known for several decades that stars are born inside egg-shaped cocoons called dense cores, which are sprinkled throughout immense clouds of cold, molecular hydrogen that are the nurseries for young stars. Through an optical telescope, these clouds look like holes in the starry sky, because the dust accompanying the gas blocks light from both the stars forming inside and the stars behind. The clouds can, however, be probed by radio telescopes, since the cold dust grains in them emit at these radio wavelengths, and radio waves are not blocked by the dust.

The Perseus molecular cloud is one such stellar nursery, about 600 light-years from Earth and about 50 light-years long. Last year, a team of astronomers completed a survey that used the Very Large Array, a collection of radio dishes in New Mexico, to look at star formation inside the cloud. Called VANDAM, it was the first complete survey of all young stars in a molecular cloud, that is, stars less than about 4 million years old, including both single and multiple stars down to separations of about 15 astronomical units. This captured all multiple stars with a separation of more than about the radius of Uranus’ orbit -- 19 AU -- in our solar system.

Stahler heard about the survey after approaching Sadavoy, a member of the VANDAM team, and asking for her help in observing young stars inside dense cores. The VANDAM survey produced a census of all Class 0 stars -- those less than about 500,000 years old -- and Class I stars -- those between about 500,000 and 1 million years old. Both types of stars are so young that they are not yet burning hydrogen to produce energy.

Sadavoy took the results from VANDAM and combined them with additional observations that reveal the egg-shaped cocoons around the young stars. These additional observations come from the Gould Belt Survey with SCUBA-2 on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii. By combining these two data sets, Sadavoy was able to produce a robust census of the binary and single-star populations in Perseus, turning up 55 young stars in 24 multiple-star systems, all but five of them binary, and 45 single-star systems.

Using these data, Sadavoy and Stahler discovered that all of the widely separated binary systems -- those with stars separated by more than 500 AU -- were very young systems, containing two Class 0 stars. These systems also tended to be aligned with the long axis of the egg-shaped dense core. The slightly older Class I binary stars were closer together, many separated by about 200 AU, and showed no tendency to align along the egg’s axis.

"This has not been seen before or tested, and is super interesting," Sadavoy said. "We don’t yet know quite what it means, but it isn't random and must say something about the way wide binaries form."

Egg-Shaped Cores Collapse into Two Centers

Stahler and Sadavoy mathematically modeled various scenarios to explain this distribution of stars, assuming typical formation, breakup and orbital shrinking times. They concluded that the only way to explain the observations is to assume that all stars of masses around that of the Sun start off as wide Class 0 binaries in egg-shaped dense cores, after which some 60 percent split up over time. The rest shrink to form tight binaries.

"As the egg contracts, the densest part of the egg will be toward the middle, and that forms two concentrations of density along the middle axis," he said. "These centers of higher density at some point collapse in on themselves because of their self-gravity to form Class 0 stars."

"Within our picture, single low-mass, Sun-like stars are not primordial," Stahler added. "They are the result of the breakup of binaries."

Their theory implies that each dense core, which typically comprises a few solar masses, converts twice as much material into stars as was previously thought.

Stahler said that he has been asking radio astronomers to compare dense cores with their embedded young stars for more than 20 years, in order to test theories of binary star formation. The new data and model are a start, he says, but more work needs to be done to understand the physics behind the rule.

Such studies may come along soon, because the capabilities of a now-upgraded VLA and the ALMA telescope in Chile, plus the SCUBA-2 survey in Hawaii, "are finally giving us the data and statistics we need. This is going to change our understanding of dense cores and the embedded stars within them," Sadavoy said.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.

For more information, contact:

Robert Sanders
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Megan Watzke
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Source:  Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA)

VLA Reveals Dramatic New Evidence About Star, Planet Formation

In this artist's conception, a widely-separated pair of young, still-forming stars is in the background, forming by fragmentation of the material in the larger cloud in which they are born. In the foreground, companions in a multiple-star system are forming through fragmentation of a dusty disk that surrounds the original young star. Credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF. Hi-res image

A young double-star system in the Perseus Molecular Cloud, imaged with the VLA. This pair would fit within the orbit of Neptune in our Solar System. 

Credit: Tobin, et al., NRAO/AUI/NSF. Hi-res image

A young triple-star system in the Perseus Molecular Cloud, imaged with the VLA. 

Credit: Tobin et al., NRAO/AUI/NSF. Hi-res image

Disks of material surrounding young stars in the Perseus Molecular Cloud, imaged with the VLA. Arrows indicate the direction of outflows from the young systems. Credit: Segura-Cox, et al., NRAO/AUI/NSF. Hi-res image

A detailed study of young stars and their surroundings has produced dramatic new evidence about how multiple-star systems form and how the dusty disks that are the raw material for planets grow around young stars. Teams of scientists used the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope to study nearly 100 newborn stars in a cloud of gas and dust about 750 light-years from Earth, in which new stars are forming.

Images made from the study showed unprecedented detail of a number of the young stars, and are helping astronomers resolve important questions about how stars, binary stars, and planets get their starts. The astronomers presented their results to the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Kissimmee, Florida.

Looking at young multiple-star systems, one team concluded that two different formation mechanisms may be at work to produce such systems. They noted that the systems they studied fall into two distinct types, based on the distance between the stars in the system. The closer systems have stars separated by about 75 times the Sun-Earth distance, and another group has its stars separated by about 3,000 times the Sun-Earth distance. They also found that more than half of the youngest stars they studied are in multiple systems, suggesting that star formation tends to produce multiples rather than single stars.

"Several different processes have been suggested for how multiple-star systems form, and our results indicate that the separation between stars may tell us which of these processes is responsible for a particular system," said John Tobin, of Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands.

Stars form in giant clouds of gas and dust, when tenuous material in such clouds collapses gravitationally into cores that then begin to draw additional material inward. Infalling material forms a rotating disk around the young star. Eventually, the young star gathers enough mass to create the temperatures and pressures at its center that will trigger thermonuclear reactions. The rotating disk around the star provides the material from which planets may form.

The researchers concluded that the more widely-separated multiple-star systems form through turbulent fragmentation of the larger cloud, while the closer systems are the result of fragmentation within the disk of material orbiting the original protostar. They also found that somewhat older systems have fewer widely-separated companions than the youngest group of protostars. This, they said, suggests that perhaps some young stars that form as widely-separated systems are not gravitationally bound and simply drift apart over time.

Another team, led by Dominique Segura-Cox, of the University of Illinois, found that the dusty disks around some of the protostars are larger than some theoretical models predict. These disks are essential to the formation of planets, some binary companions, and the young star's ability to draw in additional material. Despite their central role in these processes, however, their formation mechanisms have been debated among astronomers.

As material falls inward toward a young star, it pulls magnetic fields along with it. Theorists suggested that these fields, which become stronger as they are concentrated closer to the star, could be aligned so that they drastically slow the disk's rotation, limiting the size of the disk. Theoretical models predicted that this effect, called magnetic braking, would limit the disks to a radius about 10 times the Earth-Sun distance, or slightly more than the distance from the Sun to Saturn.

"We found disks with radii that are at least 15-30 times the Earth-Sun distance, significantly larger than the magnetic-braking model would allow," Segura-Cox said. "This is a lower limit, and the disks may actually be larger. Studies of other systems have indicated that disks are larger when observed at radio frequencies different than the ones we used in this project," she added.

One explanation for the larger disk sizes may be that, in some systems, the magnetic field and the rotation axis of the star are misaligned, a configuration that reduces the magnetic-braking effect. Evidence for this has been seen in some objects, the researchers said.

In another study published last December, a team using data from the same project found that the material falling toward one protostar is twisting the magnetic field lines and changing their configuration as it drags them inward. That study, which measured the magnetic-field alignments near the star, indicates one mechanism for minimizing the magnetic-braking effect.

"These observations of disks around such young stars suggests that all the elements needed for planet formation are present very early in the life of a star. Plus, it is probable that there are already centimeter-sized particles in these young disks, meaning that the growth of solids progresses rapidly," Tobin said.

The images for this work came from a project called the VLA Nascent Disk and Multiplicity (VANDAM) Survey. This survey used 264 hours of VLA observing time from 2013 to 2015 to study protostars in the Perseus Molecular Cloud, about 750 light-years distant. The Perseus Molecular Cloud, containing as much material as 10,000 suns, is one of the closest regions where low- to intermediate-mass stars are actively forming, and thus serves as a valuable "laboratory" for astronomers seeking to understand star formation.

"This survey sampled the largest number of young stars, and revealed fainter objects than we could study previously, and did so in greater detail. The information it provided has dramatically improved our knowledge," Tobin said.

"The disks we studied are difficult to observe as they are obscured by the cloud in which they are forming, but these new VLA observations reveal the disks and provide critical data into their formation mechanism,” Segura-Cox said.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

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Source: National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)