Category: Astronomy

A new map developed by an international team of astronomers should help you find your way around the Universe – at least to a distance of 600 million light years. This new 3-dimensional map plots out the locations of all the major superclusters of galaxies and the voids that surround them. It was developed using data from the 2MASS Redshift Survey, which calculated the redshifts (and therefore the distances) of 25,000 galaxies across the entire sky.
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A Soyuz capsule carrying the crew of Expedition 13 and space tourist Anousheh Ansari landed safely in the steppes of Kazakhstan on Thursday. The spacecraft slowed its descent using retrorockets and parachutes, and landed softly on its side. A dozen helicopter teams arrived on the scene minutes later to help the astronauts out of the spacecraft. They were then flown to a training centre outside Moscow. The total return time back to Earth took about 3 hours from when the capsule detached from the space station.
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Astronomers think they’ve got a handle on how Sun-sized stars come together. But the formation of the largest stars – more than 10 times the mass of the Sun – still puzzle astronomers. New observations on a 20 solar mass star have revealed that these giant stars maintain a torus of material around themselves. They can continuously feed from this “doughnut” of material, while powerful jets of radiation pour from their poles. The material can continue gathering onto the star while avoiding this radiation, which would normally blast it back into space.
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Astronomers used to believe that all Type 1a supernovae were essentially the same brightness. That’s because they explode with the same amount of fuel. But now a supernova has been discovered that’s twice as bright as all the other Type 1a supernovae. This is a problem, since this kind of supernovae are used as standard candles, to determine distances across the Universe. Most recently, these supernovae have been used to calculate the mysterious force called dark energy that seems to be accelerating the expansion of the Universe.
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Einstein was right. Well, according to new observations of a double pulsar, he was at least 99.95% right. An international team of astronomers have been measuring the pulsar pair for three years, and have detected several effects that match Einstein’s theory of general relativity. It’s believed the two pulsars are losing energy through the radiation of gravitational waves, and will eventually spiral into each other.
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The powerful Subaru telescope in Hawai’i has found the most distant galaxy ever seen, located 12.88 billion light-years away – this is only 780 million years after the Big Bang. Observing objects this distant is extremely difficult, not only because of the great distances involved, but because much of the Universe was obscured behind neutral hydrogen. Stars only then began clearing out this neutral hydrogen, making the Universe transparent.
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Provisionally designated 2003ub313, and nicknamed Xena by its discoverers, this newly discovered dwarf planet has been officially named Eris by the International Astronomical Union. The name was proposed by Mike Brown, a member of the team that made its discovery, and the name was accepted by the committee. In Greek lore, Eris is the goddess of discord and strife. Its moon has been named Dysnomia, the Daimon spirit of lawlessness.
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