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An interview with astronomers Takayuki Saitoh and Takaaki Takeda is presented. Saitoh describes the so-called GRAvity PipE or GRAPE system at Japan's National Astronomical Observatory and its Center for Computational Astrophysics in calculating gravity and simulating the collision of two galaxies. The simulation is said to use a realistic gas and wide temperature range to simulate a starburst. Takeda discusses animated images he produced of the simulation and their usefulness as research tools.

The article reports that the radio array of the Event Horizon Telescope team was able to peer at the very base of the jet rocketing from the giant black hole in the elliptical galaxy M87. The team utilized four radio telescopes of the still in-development EHT network. In 2011, a team led by Kazuhiro Hada of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan was able to discover how the jet's origin appeared to walk backwards toward the black hole as if converging on a fixed point.

Reports that scientists from the National Astronomical Observatory in Japan, University of Tokyo and Tohoku University have discovered the most distant galaxy from Earth. Number of light years; Use of the Subaru huge optical infrared telescope situated at the peak of Mauna Kea in Hawaii; Equipment of the telescope with Subaru Prime Focus Camera.

The article reports that Hiroshi Sudou, an astronomer at Japan-based Gifu University, and colleagues at other institutions in Japan have observed what they believe is the first black hole binary ever detected. Sudou and his colleagues set out to find a binary system by concentrating on active galaxies — those in which the central black hole absorbs gas and stars from an accretion disk, and spews powerful jets of energy. The jets emit radio waves, and Sudou and his team hoped to spot an elliptical motion in a jet that would indicate its black hole was revolving around another massive object. To get the precision required to spot such motion, they needed a second radio galaxy to provide a stable reference point. After searching the catalogs, they focused on a pair of radio galaxies in the constellation Andromeda known as 3C 66B (previously identified as a possible black hole binary) and the far more distant 3C 66A. Using the Very Long Baseline Array, a collection of 10 radio telescopes scattered from Hawaii to Puerto Rico, Sudou and colleagues made six observations.