It’s beginning to look a lot like the holiday season in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of a blizzard of stars, which resembles a swirling snowstorm in a snow globe. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →
New Map Shows the Motion of all the Galaxies in Our Supercluster For almost a century, astronomers have understood that the Universe is in a state of expansion. This is a consequence of General Relativity, and the rate at which it is expanding is known as the Hubble Constant – named after the man who first noticed the phenomena. However, astronomers have also learned that withing the large-scale structures of the Universe, galaxies and clusters have also been moving closer and relative to one other. For decades, astronomers have sought to track how these movements have taken place over the course of cosmic history. AndRead More →
Where do most of the elements essential for life on Earth come from? The answer: inside the furnaces of stars and the explosions that mark the end of some stars’ lives. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →
(Phys.org)—Astronomers report the detection of new eruptions in two luminous blue variables, known as R 40 and R 110, located in the Magellanic Clouds. The finding, presented December 5 in a paper published on the arXiv pre-print repository, could shed new light on the final phases of stellar evolution process. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →
In this podcast extra we begin a series, suggested by listener Sean Smith, of explaining the considerations involved in choosing practical astronomy equipment. This first in the series discusses one of the most important items in your amateur astronomy tool kit: Eyepieces. This discussion takes in: Why eyepieces are important The differences between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ eyepieces Choosing the right price point Our suggestions for good quality cheap and expensive eyepieces Don’t forget our end of year review and Newtonmass panotmime will be available to download on Christmas Day. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →
Astronomers have used two Australian radio telescopes and several optical telescopes to study complex mechanisms that are fuelling jets of material blasting away from a black hole 55 million times more massive than the Sun. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →
Breakthrough Listen is Going to Scan ‘Oumuamua, You Know, Just to be Sure it’s Just an Asteroid and Not a Spaceship. On October 19th, 2017, the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System-1 (Pan-STARRS-1) in Hawaii announced the first-ever detection of an interstellar asteroid, named 1I/2017 U1 (aka. ‘Oumuamua). Based on subsequent measurements of its shape (highly elongated and thin), there was some speculation that it might actually be an interstellar spacecraft (the name “Rama” ring a bell?). For this reason, there are those who would like to study this object before it heads back out into interstellar space. While groups like Project Lyra proposeRead More →
Messier 63 – the Sunflower Galaxy Welcome back to Messier Monday! Today, we continue in our tribute to our dear friend, Tammy Plotner, by looking at the “Sunflower Galaxy”, otherwise known as Messier 63. 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 the mostRead More →
Traditionally, most star names used by astronomers have come from Arabic, Greek, or Latin origins. Now, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) Division C Working Group on Star Names (WGSN) has formally approved 86 new names for stars drawn from those used by other cultures, namely Australian Aboriginal, Chinese, Coptic, Hindu, Mayan, Polynesian, and South African. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →
University of Leeds researchers have mathematically examined plasma jets from supermassive black holes to determine why certain types of jets disintegrate into huge plumes. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →
(Phys.org)—Astronomers have found a dozen new faint Herbig-Haro objects in the dark nebula LDN 673 by employing a novel color-composite imaging method. The discovery, reported in a paper published December 1 on the arXiv pre-print server, could provide new important information about star formation process. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →
Silence of the WA outback key in detecting low-frequency radio waves and, maybe, the precursors of life itself. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →
Don’t be fooled! The cosmic swirl of stars in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image may seem tranquil and unassuming, but this spiral galaxy, known as ESO 580-49, actually displays some explosive tendencies. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →
A young massive star that began life around 25 times more massive than our own Sun is shedding shells of material and fast winds to create this dynamic scene captured by ESA’s XMM-Newton. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →
The gas and dust in giant molecular clouds gradually come together under the influence of gravity to form stars. Precisely how this occurs, however, is incompletely understood. The mass of a star, for example, is by far the most important factor constraining its future evolution, but astronomers do not clearly understand what determines the exact mass of a newly forming star. One aspect of this problem is simply knowing how many stars of each size there are, that is, knowing the distribution of stellar masses in a large cluster of stars. The initial mass function (IMF) describes this distribution, and is currently based on anRead More →
Too Big, Too Soon. Monster Black Hole Seen Shortly After the Big Bang It is a well known fact among astronomers and cosmologists that the farther into the Universe you look, the further back in time you are seeing. And the closer astronomers are able to see to the Big Bang, which took place 13.8 billion years ago, the more interesting the discoveries tend to become. It is these finds that teach us the most about the earliest periods of the Universe and its subsequent evolution. For instance, scientists using the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and the Magellan Telescopes recently observed the earliest SupermassiveRead More →
Earth and Venus are the Same Size, so Why Doesn’t Venus Have a Magnetosphere? Maybe it Didn’t Get Smashed Hard Enough For many reasons, Venus is sometimes referred to as “Earth’s Twin” (or “Sister Planet”, depending on who you ask). Like Earth, it is terrestrial (i.e. rocky) in nature, composed of silicate minerals and metals that are differentiated between an iron-nickel core and silicate mantle and crust. But when it comes to their respective atmospheres and magnetic fields, our two planets could not be more different. For some time, astronomers have struggled to answer why Earth has a magnetic field (which allows it to retainRead More →
Planetary systems form out of disks of gas and dust around young stars. How the formation proceeds, however, is complex and poorly understood. Many physical processes are involved including accretion onto the star, photoevaporation of material of the disk, interactions of the disk with planetary embryos, growth of the dust grains, settling of the dust to the midplane of the disk, and more. To unravel these various factors, observations of protoplanetary disks at multiple wavelengths are used; the submillimeter wavelength range in particular offers a way to peer through most of the disk to estimate dust masses directly. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →
Encountering a black hole would be a frightening prospect for our planet. We know that these cosmic monsters ferociously devour any object that strays too close to their “event horizon” – the last chance of escape. But even though black holes drive some of the most energetic phenomena in the universe, the physics of their behaviour, including how they feed, remains hotly debated. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →
A team of astronomers from Maryland, Hawaii, Israel, and France has produced the most detailed map ever of the orbits of galaxies in our extended local neighborhood, showing the past motions of almost 1400 galaxies within 100 million light years of the Milky Way. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →
