Space and astronomy news
Image credit: ESO A team of European astronomers have located the closest brown dwarf star ever discovered. Epsilon Indi, located only 12 light-years from the Earth, was thought to be a single star, but the ESO team spotted its companion. Epsilon Indi B is 45 times the mass of Jupiter and takes 400 years to …
Image credit: Hubble The most recent photos released from the Hubble Space Telescope show objects so old they might be from a time when stars in the universe were just starting to shine in significant numbers – about 13 billion years ago. These objects are at the limit of Hubble’s resolving power, but the next …
Image credit: NRAO Theorized by Einstein for almost a century, physicists have found evidence to support the theory that the force of gravity moves at the speed of light. The speed was measured by physicist Sergei Kopeikin by watching how light from a distant quasar was bent by Jupiter’s gravity. Variations in how the image …
Image credit: Hubble The Hubble Space Telescope has used a natural 2-million-light-year wide “zoom lens” to look further into space than it normally could. By peering directly through the centre of one of the most massive galactic clusters known, it was able to take advantage of a technique called gravitational lensing to see objects beyond …
Continue reading “Hubble Uses Galactic Lens to Look Further”
Image credit: NASA A team of French and American astronomers have discovered the presence of salt (NaCl) in Io’s atmosphere. They think that the salt was ejected into the Jovian moon’s atmosphere by the many volcanos that ceaselessly bubble across its surface. The atmosphere of Io has been studied for several years now, first observed …
Image credit: NASA A team of astronomers have taken the highest resolution mid-infrared picture ever taken of the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The image is so detailed, you can actually see dust swirling around the giant black hole located at the centre of the galaxy. The camera, called the Mid-Infrared Large-Well Imager, or …
Continue reading “Best Infrared Image Ever Taken of our Galaxy’s Heart”
Image credit: NASA NASA announced today that it has awarded an $825 million contract to aerospace firm TRW to build the replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope: The James Webb Space Telescope. Named for NASA’s second administrator, this new observatory will launch in 2010 and operate 1.5 million km away from the Earth (Hubble is …
Continue reading “NASA Awards $825 Million Contract for Hubble Successor”
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 …