The hunt for violent cosmic events, or ripples in the fabric of space-time, just got a major boost. The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) will be joining the search, thanks to a $14.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
The funding will allow for the creation and operation of a physics frontiers center to study fast-spinning stars known as millisecond pulsars for fluctuations that could reveal the presence of gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of space-time.
The supermassive black hole is 40 million times as massive as the sun and powers a quasar that existed 700 million years after the Big Bang.
The asteroid zoomed by Earth at a perfectly safe distance of around 1.8 million miles (2.9 kilometers).
Images show surprise changes to the spacecraft as it interacted with the atmosphere.
