When it Comes to Gamma Radiation, the Moon is Actually Brighter Than the Sun The eerie, hellish glow coming from the Moon may seem unreal in this image, since it’s invisible to our eyes. But instruments that detect gamma rays tell us it’s real. More than just a grainy, red picture, it’s a vivid reminder […]
Why Build Big Rockets at All? It’s Time for Orbital Refueling On Tuesday, July 30th, NASA announced 19 different partnerships with 13 different companies to use their expertise to help them develop space technologies, from advanced communications systems to new methods of entry, descent and landing. Instead of contracting out specific projects, NASA will make […]
Best of both worlds: Asteroids and massive mergers The race is on. Since the construction of technology able to detect the ripples in space and time triggered by collisions from massive objects in the universe, astronomers around the world have been searching for the bursts of light that could accompany such collisions, which are thought […]
Image: Hubble’s portrait of star’s gaseous glow Although it looks more like an entity seen through a microscope than a telescope, this rounded object, named NGC 2022, is certainly not algae or tiny, blobby jellyfish. Instead, it is a vast orb of gas in space, cast off by an aging star. The star is visible […]
An Astrophotographer Noticed a Chunk of Ice Orbiting Comet 67P in Rosetta’s Photos The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta mission spent two years at the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. At the end of September 2016, its mission was ended when the spacecraft was sent on a collision course into the comet. During its time at comet 67P, […]
Conceptual design ready for PLATO telescope simulator SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research designs and builds a space simulator to test and calibrate eight out of twenty-six cameras for ESA’s next exoplanet hunter telescope, PLATO. The conceptual design is now complete. PLATO will be able to spot smaller planets in larger orbits than its predecessors. […]
Total annihilation for supermassive stars A renegade star exploding in a distant galaxy has forced astronomers to set aside decades of research and focus on a new breed of supernova that can utterly annihilate its parent star—leaving no remnant behind. The signature event, something astronomers had never witnessed before, may represent the way in which […]
How astronomers chase new worlds in TESS data As pink liquid oozed around her shoes, astronomer Johanna Teske started to feel sick. She had been looking for new planets with the Planet Finder Spectrograph, an astronomical instrument resembling an industrial-sized refrigerator mounted to the Magellan II telescope. One night in October 2018, a hose leading […]
Three new Beta Cephei stars detected Using NASA’s prolonged Kepler mission, known as K2, astronomers have identified three new Beta Cephei stars. The newly found trio is an important addition to the still short list of known stars of this type. The finding is detailed in a paper published August 7 on the arXiv pre-print […]
Stellar evolution in real time detected in the old star T Ursae Minoris An international team of astronomers succeeded in detecting signs of aging in the red supergiant star T UMi. The star in the Little Bear constellation is currently going through its last nuclear “hiccups,” and will soon end its 1.2 billion year-long life. […]
#86 – August 2019 Part 2 The Discussion: Following on from last month’s 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, we take a look at the recent movies and documentaries & social media: High Life, 8 Days to the Moon and Back, Apollo 50th, ApolloinRealTime.org. The ongoing inspiration of Apollo, the build-up of Project […]
Neutron Star Suffers a “Glitch”, Gives Astronomers a Glimpse Into How They Work What, exactly, is the inside of a neutron star like? A neutron star is what remains after a massive star goes supernova. It’s a tightly-packed, ultra-dense body made of—you guessed it—neutrons. Actually, that’s not absolutely true. Mathematical models show that neutron stars […]
Rocket Lab is Going to try to Re-use its First Stage Booster, Catching it in Mid-air With a Helicopter CEO Peter Beck of Rocket Lab recently announced that his company will begin retrieving the first stage of its Electron rocket with a helicopter. The post Rocket Lab is Going to try to Re-use its First […]
Automated observing network inaugurated at SOAR telescope Supernovae, neutron star mergers, black holes at the center of galaxies, erupting young stars—these are all examples of objects in the night sky that change their brightness over time. In the coming years, astronomers expect to discover millions of these variable astronomical events with new sensitive telescopes like […]
How many Earth-like planets are around sun-like stars? A new study provides the most accurate estimate of the frequency that planets that are similar to Earth in size and in distance from their host star occur around stars similar to our Sun. Knowing the rate that these potentially habitable planets occur will be important for […]
Milky Way’s Black Hole Just Flared, Growing 75 Times as Bright for a Few Hours Even though the black hole at the center of the Milky Way is a monster, it’s still rather quiet. Called Sagittarius A*, it’s about 4.6 million times more massive than our Sun. Usually, it’s a brooding behemoth. But scientists observing […]
Spacecraft Gyroscopes And Reaction Wheels. You Can Never Have Enough It’s amazing to think there are telescopes up in space, right now, directing their gaze at distant objects for hours, days and even weeks. Providing a point of view so stable and accurate that we can learn details about galaxies, exoplanets and more. And then, […]
Fluorescent glow may reveal hidden life in the cosmos Astronomers have uncovered a new way of searching for life in the cosmos. Harsh ultraviolet radiation flares from red suns, once thought to destroy surface life on planets, might help uncover hidden biospheres. Their radiation could trigger a protective glow from life on exoplanets called biofluorescence, […]
Finding a cosmic fog within shattered intergalactic pancakes To understand the most ordinary matter in the universe—and the extraordinary things that happen to it—a Yale-led team of astronomers took a deep dive into the cosmic fog. phys.org Go to Source
Second baby planet found using pioneering technique Monash astrophysicists using the ALMA telescope in Chile have a made a world-first discovery with the sighting of a second new ‘baby’ planet (two to three times heavier than Jupiter) inside a gas and dust gap. phys.org Go to Source
