Category: Astronomy

Astronomers have turned up 20 new star systems in our corner of the Milky Way. The discoveries were made by the Research Consortium on Nearby Stars (RECONS) using the parallax method. The angles to various stars were measured at different times in the year – when the Earth is on opposite sides of the Sun. The closer a star is, the more its position will shift in the sky. This new batch of stars included the 23rd and 24th closest stars to the Earth.
Continue reading “New Stellar Neighbours Found”

Most scientists believe that the Moon hasn’t seen any volcanic activity in billions of years, but there could be new evidence that volcanic gasses are continuing to vent out onto the lunar surface. A new story published in the journal Nature explains how researchers found a region on the Moon that looks freshly deposited, with very few impact craters. Another view, which actually reveals the surface minerals, shows that the region hasn’t been weathered nearly as much as the surrounding environment.
Continue reading “Maybe the Moon Isn’t Quite Dead Yet”

This photograph, taken by the Japanese Space Agency’s AKARI spacecraft, shows the Large Magellanic Cloud – a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way visible from the Southern Hemisphere. The spacecraft is in the process of scanning the entire sky in the infrared spectrum. This view of the Large Magellanic Cloud shows how the distribution of gas and dust that forms a disk-like structure. The bright region in the bottom-left of the image is the famous Tarantula Nebula, where many new stars are forming.
Continue reading “AKARI’s Infrared View of the Large Magellanic Cloud”

One of the most powerful supercomputers on Earth has simulated the interiors of low mass stars, helping scientists understand their evolution. As these stars exhaust their hydrogen fuel, they eject helium into their surrounding neighbourhood. But the quantities of this ejected helium didn’t match observations by telescopes. This new simulation shows that stars can actually destroy some of this helium inside the star, instead of ejecting it into space.
Continue reading “Supercomputer Simulates Stellar Evolution”

This Spitzer photograph contains several nebulae located in the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The dark, snake-like nebula at the upper left contains dozens of huge newborn stars, some with 50 times the mass of our Sun. The red sphere in the image is a supernova remnant. Before it exploded, the central star probably played a role in the creation of the dark nebulae in the region.
Continue reading “Dark Nebula Slithers Across the Sky”

A new photograph from the Spitzer Space Telescope shows how supernova remnant Cassiopeia A evolved over time. The original star contained 15 to 20 times the mass of our Sun, and was made up of concentric shells of elements. The lightest elements, like hydrogen, were in the outermost shell, while the heaviest elements sunk to the centre. The shells of exploded material match up quite well with the original layers in the star before it detonated as a supernova.
Continue reading “Stellar Explosion Has Many Layers”

Astronomers have discovered two of the most distant galaxies ever seen, when the Universe was only 700 million years old. The galaxies were first discovered as part of the Hubble Space Telescope’s Deep Field Survey, which looked into the distant Universe. Astronomers then did follow-on observations with the Spitzer Space Telescope to confirm their distance and age. The galaxies are thought to be between 50-300 million years old, and have only 1% of the mass of our own Milky Way.
Continue reading “Baby Galaxies Weighed by Spitzer”