News (Page 467)

Beyond the brim, Sombrero Galaxy’s halo suggests turbulent past Surprising new data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope suggests the smooth, settled “brim” of the Sombrero galaxy’s disk may be concealing a turbulent past. Hubble’s sharpness and sensitivity resolves tens of thousands of individual stars in the Sombrero’s vast, extended halo, the region beyond a galaxy’s central portion, typically made of older stars. These latest observations of the Sombrero are turning conventional theory on its head, showing only a tiny fraction of older, metal-poor stars in the halo, plus an unexpected abundance of metal-rich stars typically found only in a galaxy’s disk, and the central bulge.Read More →

Sub-Neptune sized planet validated with the habitable-zone planet finder A signal originally detected by the Kepler spacecraft has been validated as an exoplanet using the Habitable-zone Planet Finder (HPF), an astronomical spectrograph built by a Penn State team and recently installed on the 10m Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas. The HPF provides the highest precision measurements to date of infrared signals from nearby low-mass stars, and astronomers used it to validate the candidate planet by excluding all possibilities of contaminating signals to very high level of probability. The details of the findings appear in the Astronomical Journal. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

How newborn stars prepare for the birth of planets An international team of astronomers used two of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world to create more than three hundred images of planet-forming disks around very young stars in the Orion Clouds. These images reveal new details about the birthplaces of planets and the earliest stages of star formation. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Eighteen-hour-year planet on edge of destruction Astronomers from the University of Warwick have observed an exoplanet orbiting a star in just over 18 hours, the shortest orbital period ever observed for a planet of its type. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Stargazing with computers: What machine learning can teach us about the cosmos Gazing up at the night sky in a rural area, you’ll probably see the shining moon surrounded by stars. If you’re lucky, you might spot the furthest thing visible with the naked eye—the Andromeda galaxy. It’s the nearest neighbor to our galaxy, the Milky Way. But that’s just the tiniest fraction of what’s out there. When the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera at the National Science Foundation’s Vera Rubin Observatory turns on in 2022, it will take photos of 37 billion galaxies and stars over theRead More →

One small step: Getting started with astronomy Keen to get into astronomy or stargazing, but no idea how to start? Don’t worry—it’s easier than you think. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Long-term multi-wavelength observations shed more light on blazar 1ES 1215+303 An international team of astronomers has performed a decade-long, multi-wavelength monitoring campaign of the blazar 1ES 1215+303. Results of this extensive study provide more insights into the nature of emission from this source. The research is detailed in a paper published February 10 on arXiv.org. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

LOFAR pioneers new way to study exoplanet environments sing the Dutch-led Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope, astronomers have discovered unusual radio waves coming from the nearby red dwarf star GJ1151. The radio waves bear the tell-tale signature of aurorae caused by an interaction between a star and its planet. The radio emission from a star-planet interaction has been predicted for over thirty-years but this is the first time astronomers have been able to discern its signature. This method, only possible with a sensitive radio telescope like LOFAR, opens the door to a new way of discovering exoplanets in the habitable zone and studying theRead More →

Image: Hubble embraces spiral with open arms The spiral galaxy NGC 2008 sits center stage, its ghostly spiral arms spreading out toward us, in this image captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Globular cluster system of NGC 4546 studied in detail Using the Gemini-South telescope, astronomers have performed a photometric study of the lenticular galaxy NGC 4546. Results of the new research provide more clues about the structure and nature of the galaxy’s globular cluster system. The study was published February 7 on arXiv.org. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Earth climate models and the search for life on other planets In a generic brick building on the northwestern edge of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center campus in Greenbelt, Maryland, thousands of computers packed in racks the size of vending machines hum in a deafening chorus of data crunching. Day and night, they spit out 7 quadrillion calculations per second. These machines collectively are known as NASA’s Discover supercomputer and they are tasked with running sophisticated climate models to predict Earth’s future climate. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

A submillimeter survey of protostars The formation of stars involves the complex interactions of many phenomena, including gravitational collapse, magnetic fields, turbulence, stellar feedback, and cloud rotation. The balance between these effects varies significantly between sources, and astronomers have adopted a statistical approach to understand the typical, early-stage star formation sequence. The earliest stage is called the protostellar stage. For low-mass stars (those with masses about that of the sun) this stage is usually separated into two subclasses as the star grows by accreting material from a massive envelope whose size can extend between five hundred and ten thousand astronomical units (AU) in a processRead More →