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They Just Began Casting the Giant Magellan Telescope’s 5th Mirror. What a Monster Job. The fifth mirror for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) is now being cast, according to an announcement from the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization (GMTO), the body behind the project. The GMT is a ground-breaking segmented telescope consisting of 7 gigantic mirrors, and is being built at the Las Campanas Observatory, in Atacama, Chile. The mirrors for the GMT are being cast at the Richard F. Caris Mirror Laboratory, at the University of Arizona. This lab is the world centre when it comes to building large mirrors for telescopes. But in aRead More →

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A giant collision of several galaxy clusters, each containing hundreds of galaxies, has produced this spectacular panorama of shocks and energy. The collisions generated shock waves that set off a celestial fireworks display of bright radio emission, seen as red and orange. In the center of the image, the purple indicates X-rays caused by extreme heating. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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Black holes make for a great space mystery. They’re so massive that nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole once it gets close enough. A great mystery for scientists is that there’s evidence of powerful jets of electrons and protons that shoot out of the top and bottom of some black holes. Yet no one knows how these jets form. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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(Phys.org)—Mexican astronomers report the discovery of seven new large extragalactic radio sources called giant radio galaxies (GRG). The GRGs were found by visual inspection of radio images provided by two astronomical radio surveys. The findings were presented October 31 in a paper published on arXiv.org. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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A Chalmers-led team of astronomers has for the first time observed details on the surface of an aging star with the same mass as the sun. ALMA’s images show that the star is a giant, its diameter twice the size of Earth’s orbit around the sun; they report that the star’s atmosphere is affected by powerful, unexpected shock waves. The research was published in Nature Astronomy. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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New Study Says Enceladus had Internal Ocean for Billions of Years When the Cassini mission arrived in the Saturn system in 2004, it discovered something rather unexpected in Enceladus’ southern hemisphere. From hundreds of fissures located in the polar region, plumes of water and organic molecules were spotted periodically spewing forth. This was the first indication that Saturn’s moon may have an interior ocean caused by hydrothermal activity near the core-mantle boundary. According to a new study based on Cassini data, which it obtained before diving into Saturn’s atmosphere on September 15th, this activity may have been going on for some time. In fact, theRead More →

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Messier 59 – the NGC 4621 Elliptical Galaxy Welcome back to Messier Monday! Today, we continue in our tribute to our dear friend, Tammy Plotner, by looking at the spiral galaxy known as Messier 59. In the 18th century, while searching the night sky for comets, French astronomer Charles Messier kept noting the presence of fixed, diffuse objects he initially mistook for comets. In time, he would come to compile a list of approximately 100 of these objects, hoping to prevent other astronomers from making the same mistake. This list – known as the Messier Catalog – would go on to become one of theRead More →

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Cutting-Edge Astronomy Confirms Most Ancient Galaxy to Date Since the deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have been able to look deeper into the cosmic web than ever before. The farther they’ve looked, the deeper back in time they are able to see, and thus learn what the Universe looked like billions of years ago. With the deployment of other cutting-edge telescopes and observatories, scientists have been able to learn a great deal more about the history and evolution of the cosmos. Most recently, an international team of astronomers using the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii were able to spot a spiral galaxy locatedRead More →

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Enough heat to power hydrothermal activity inside Saturn’s ocean moon Enceladus for billions of years could be generated through tidal friction if the moon has a highly porous core, a new study finds, working in favour of the moon as a potentially habitable world. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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Astronomers using the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT), which is operated jointly by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica, report today in Nature Astronomy that they have detected the second most distant dusty, star-forming galaxy ever found in the universe – born in the first one billion years after the Big Bang. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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(Phys.org)—As a result of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope observations of a microlensing event, astronomers have found an extremely massive alien world circling a star located in the Milky Way’s bulge. The newly discovered planet, designated OGLE-2016-BLG-1190Lb, is the first Spitzer microlensing exoworld residing in the galactic bulge. The finding was presented October 27 in a paper published on arXiv.org. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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Ryo Ando, a graduate student of the University of Tokyo, and his colleagues have observed the galaxy NGC 253 and resolved its locations of star formation down to the scale of a molecular cloud, a star formation site with a size of about 30 light-years. As a result, they identified eight massive, dusty clouds aligned along the center of the galaxy. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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The universe contains some truly massive objects. Although we are still unsure how such gigantic things come to be, the current leading theory is known as hierarchical clustering, whereby small clumps of matter collide and merge to grow ever larger. The 14-billion-year history of the universe has seen the formation of some enormous cosmic structures, including galaxy groups, clusters, and superclusters—the largest known structures in the cosmos! Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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The SpaceX Booster is Back in Town, Legs Quickly Detached: Photo/Video Gallery Recovered SpaceX first stage booster from KoreaSat-5A launch is towed into the mouth of Port Canaveral, FL atop OCISLY droneship to flocks of birds and onlookers as Atlantic Ocean waves crash onshore at sunset Nov. 2, 2017. Credit: Ken Kremer/Kenkremer.com PORT CANAVERAL/KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL – ‘The SpaceX boosters back in town! The boosters back in town!’ paraphrasing the popular lyrics of the hit single from Irish hard rock band Thin Lizzy – its what comes to mind with the speedy cadence of ‘launch, land and relaunch’ firmly established by CEO Elon Musk’sRead More →