News (Page 746)

How NASA’s Spitzer has stayed alive for so long After nearly 16 years of exploring the cosmos in infrared light, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope will be switched off permanently on Jan. 30, 2020. By then, the spacecraft will have operated for more than 11 years beyond its prime mission, thanks to the Spitzer engineering team’s ability to address unique challenges as the telescope slips farther and farther from Earth. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Earth’s heavy metals result of supernova explosion That gold on your ring finger is stellar—and not just in a complimentary way. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Fermi mission reveals its highest-energy gamma-ray bursts For 10 years, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has scanned the sky for gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), the universe’s most luminous explosions. A new catalog of the highest-energy blasts provides scientists with fresh insights into how they work. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Hubble observes tiny galaxy with big heart Nestled within this field of bright foreground stars lies ESO 495-21, a tiny galaxy with a big heart. ESO 495-21 may be just 3000 light-years across, but that is not stopping the galaxy from furiously forming huge numbers of stars. It may also host a supermassive black hole; this is unusual for a galaxy of its size, and may provide intriguing hints as to how galaxies form and evolve. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Why do massive (and not-so-massive) stars form? The Milky Way Project: Probing Star Formation with a New Yellowball Catalog presents a study of 518 infant star-forming regions known as “Yellowballs,” drawn from a catalog made possible by the efforts of citizen scientists. The Milky Way Project is one of roughly 100 research initiatives in Zooniverse, the world’s largest online platform for citizen science. During 2016-2017, citizen scientists identified more than 6,000 Yellowballs (YBs), which were named for their appearance in Spitzer Space Telescope images. A major result of the new study is that YBs provide snapshots in time of nascent star-forming regions spanning an enormousRead More →

The entire sky in X-rays The small fleet of X-ray space scouts will soon be expanded to include a flagship. On 21 June 2019, the German telescope eRosita will launch from the Russian Baikonur space-port into space. On a platform on board the Proton M launcher, there is a Russian telescope called Art-XC alongside eRosita. The main goal of the eRosita mission—developed and built by a consortium of German institutes led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching—is the first complete sky survey in the medium X-ray range up to an energy of ten keV. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Astrophysicists announce discovery that could rewrite story of how galaxies die At the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis, Missouri, Allison Kirkpatrick, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas, will announce her discovery of “cold quasars”—galaxies featuring an abundance of cold gas that still can produce new stars despite having a quasar at the center—a breakthrough finding that overturns assumptions about the maturation of galaxies and may represent a phase of every galaxy’s lifecycle that was unknown until now. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Jupiter-like exoplanets found in sweet spot in most planetary systems As planets form in the swirling gas and dust around young stars, there seems to be a sweet spot where most of the large, Jupiter-like gas giants congregate, centered around the orbit where Jupiter sits today in our own solar system. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Gemini Planet Imager analyzes 300 stars Over the past four years, an instrument attached to a telescope in the Chilean Andes—known as the Gemini Planet Imager—has set its gaze on 531 stars in search of new planets. The team, led by Stanford University, is now releasing initial findings from the first half of the survey, published June 12 in The Astronomical Journal. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

New evidence shows crash with Antlia 2 gave the Milky Way the ripples in its outer disc The newly-discovered dark dwarf galaxy Antlia 2’s collision with the Milky Way may be responsible for our galaxy’s characteristic ripples in its outer disc, according to a study led by Rochester Institute of Technology Assistant Professor Sukanya Chakrabarti. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Magnetic field may be keeping Milky Way’s black hole quiet Supermassive black holes exist at the center of most galaxies, and our Milky Way is no exception. But many other galaxies have highly active black holes, meaning a lot of material is falling into them, emitting high-energy radiation in this “feeding” process. The Milky Way’s central black hole, on the other hand, is relatively quiet. New observations from NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, are helping scientists understand the differences between active and quiet black holes. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Three dark fields for Euclid’s deep survey Scientists in the Euclid Consortium have selected three extremely dark patches of the sky that will be the subject of the mission’s deepest observations, aiming at exploring faint and rare objects in the Universe. The position of the Euclid Deep Fields – one in the northern sky and two in the southern sky – was announced last week, during the annual consortium meeting in Helsinki, Finland. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

X-ray study sheds more light into the nature of a gamma-ray pulsar Using archival data from ESA’s XMM-Newton spacecraft and NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory, astronomers have investigated one of gamma-ray radio-quiet pulsars known as PSR J1826−1256. The study, based on X-ray observations, sheds more light into the nature of this peculiar object and its pulsar wind nebula (PWN). Results of the research were presented in a paper published June 3 on arXiv.org. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

The sun may have a dual personality, simulations suggest Researchers at CU Boulder have discovered hints that humanity’s favorite star may have a dual personality, with intriguing discrepancies in its magnetic fields that could hold clues to the sun’s own “internal clock.” phys.org Go to SourceRead More →