Space and astronomy news
Image credit: ESO The latest image released from the European Southern Observatory is of the Tarantula Nebula, located in the Large Magellanic Cloud approximately 170,000 light years from here. The nebula measures more than 1,000 light years across and covers the same amount of sky as the Moon. The image is a composite made up …
Image credit: NASA A team of astronomers from the Space believe that red quasars may be more common in the Universe than previously thought. Quasars are bright, distant objects and the current theory is that they are caused by the black holes that reside at the centre of galaxies – because they’re so hot, they …
Image credit: ESA Some scientists have theorized that life on Earth began when amino acids, the building blocks of life, were delivered from space by comets and asteroids. The European Space Agency is planning two missions to help gather more evidence. Rosetta, due for launch in 2003, will study the composition of gas and dust …
Image credit: 2MASS One of the most groundbreaking work in astronomy being done right now is the Two Micron All-Sky Survey which is producing a high-resolution survey of the entire sky in the Infrared spectrum. Two telescopes, one in Arizona, the other in Cerro Tololo, Chile have been working non-stop for 4 years to take …
Image credit: NASA A team of astronomers from UCLA have found cloudy, stormy atmospheres on brown dwarfs – objects larger than gas giants like Jupiter, but not large enough to ignite into full stars. They believe the discovery of these storms could provide insights into some strange observations of brown dwarfs. Instead of steadily cooling, …
Image credit: Gemini Thanks to the adaptive optics system of the Gemini observatory, astronomers have been able to spot a brown dwarf orbiting a star only three times the distance of the Earth to the Sun. This newly discovered pair, LHS 2397a, is located only 46 light years from Earth and is the closest separation …
Image credit: NASA Jupiter pushed past the other planets with the recent discovery of 11 new moons, bringing its total to 39. A team of US astronomers discovered the additional satellites (all 2-4 kilometres in diameter) using one of the world’s most powerful telescopes: the Canada-France-Hawaii 3.6 metre. Digital images of the space around Jupiter …
Image credit: Hubble A new photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows a nebula formed around a group of young, hot, stars. Designated N44C, the nebula is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby, small companion galaxy to the Milky Way. It’s peculiar because the star located at the centre of the nebula …
Image credit: PPARC A team of UK astronomers have discovered a new class of cannibalistic stars that may explain one of the mysteries surrounding the Big Bang. These stars formed shortly after the Big Bang but don’t contain any lithium -which astronomers predicted should be there. Astronomers believed that they must have misunderstood some essential …
Continue reading “Cannibalistic Stars May Hold Clues to the Big Bang”
Image credit: NASA NASA has selected two new concepts to advance the search for extrasolar planets; one of the technologies will eventually be selected for the Terrestrial Planet Finder mission. The first choice involves the use of an Infrared Interferometer, where multiple spacecraft will simulate a much larger observatory and search for the infrared signature …