News (Page 492)

Thousands of new globular clusters have formed over the last billion years Globular clusters may contain hundreds of thousands of stars and may even have as many as ten million stars that essentially emerged at the same time. They are the oldest visible objects in the universe. Globular clusters come together in dense, spherical volumes with diameters hundreds of times smaller than the diameter of our galaxy. The Milky Way is surrounded by about 150 globular clusters, some of which are visible in the darkness of the night. But about ten or twenty thousand globular clusters can be found around the giant galaxies located atRead More →

42 years on, Voyager 2 charts interstellar space A probe launched by NASA four days after Elvis died has delivered a treasure trove of data from beyond the “solar bubble” that envelops Earth and our neighbouring planets, scientists reported Monday. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Voyager 2 reaches interstellar space: Scientists detect plasma density jump Voyager 1 has a companion in the realm of the stars. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Image: Hubble views a not-so-lonely galaxy Galaxies may seem lonely, floating alone in the vast, inky blackness of the sparsely populated cosmos—but looks can be deceiving. This image of NGC 1706, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, is a good example of this. NGC 1706 is a spiral galaxy, about 230 million light-years away, in the constellation of Dorado (the Swordfish). phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

New study sheds more light on the properties of three polars Cataclysmic variables (CVs) are binary star systems consisting of a white dwarf and a normal star companion. They irregularly increase in brightness by a large factor, then drop back down to a quiescent state. Although over 140 polars have been detected to date, only 33 of them have been identified as eclipsing systems. Observations of these rare objects could offer astronomers more opportunities to study magnetic accretion in binaries, for instance. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Mobile app to provide the latest on black hole collisions and merging neutron stars PhD students from the Institute for Gravitational Wave Astronomy have released a new app to encourage members of the public to stay up to date with new gravitational wave events in near real time. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Jupiter-sized exoplanet discovered through microlensing The path of a light beam is bent by the presence of mass, and a massive body can therefore act like a lens (a “gravitational lens”) to distort the image of an object seen behind it. Scientists first confirmed Einstein’s prediction quantitatively during the now famous total eclipse of 29 May 1919 by observing starlight bent by the mass of the Sun. Microlensing is the name given to a related phenomenon: the brightening of light from a star as a cosmic body, acting as a gravitational lens, passing fortuitously in front of it, the light then dimming to normal asRead More →

Ancient gas cloud shows that the first stars must have formed very quickly Astronomers led by Eduardo Bañados of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy have discovered a gas cloud that contains information about an early phase of galaxy and star formation, merely 850 million years after the Big Bang. The cloud was found serendipitously during observations of a distant quasar, and it has the properties that astronomers expect from the precursors of modern-day dwarf galaxies. When it comes to relative abundances, the cloud’s chemistry is surprisingly modern, showing that the first stars in the universe must have formed very quickly after the Big Bang.Read More →

Worldwide observations confirm nearby ‘lensing’ exoplanet Researchers using telescopes around the world confirmed and characterized an exoplanet orbiting a nearby star through a rare phenomenon known as gravitational microlensing. The exoplanet has a mass similar to Neptune, but it orbits a star lighter (cooler) than the Sun at an orbital radius similar to Earth’s orbital radius. Around cool stars, this orbital region is thought to be the birth place of gas-giant planets. The results of this research suggest that Neptune-sized planets could be common around this orbital region. Because the exoplanet discovered this time is closer than other exoplanets discovered by the same method, itRead More →

Scientists may have discovered whole new class of black holes Black holes are an important part of how astrophysicists make sense of the universe—so important that scientists have been trying to build a census of all the black holes in the Milky Way galaxy. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Researchers discover mechanisms for the cause of the Big Bang The origin of the universe started with the Big Bang, but how the supernova explosion ignited has long been a mystery—until now. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →