Space and astronomy news
The Tarantula Nebula is a star formation region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Tarantula is about 160,000 light-years away and is highly luminous for a non-stellar object. It’s the brightest and largest star formation region in the entire Local Group of galaxies.
But it shouldn’t be.
Continue reading “The Tarantula Nebula Shouldn’t Be Forming Stars. What’s Going On?”
Stars are born in molecular clouds, massive clouds of hydrogen that can contain millions of stellar masses of material. But how do molecular clouds form? There are different theories and models of that process, but the cloud formation is difficult to observe.
A new study is making some headway, and showing how the process occurs more rapidly than thought.
Continue reading “Speedrunning Star Formation in the Cygnus X Region”
For decades, astronomers have speculated that there may be water on the Moon. In recent years, this speculation was confirmed one orbiting satellite after another detected water ice around the Moon’s southern polar region. Within this part of the lunar surface, known as the South-Pole Aitken Basin, water ice is able to persist because of the many permanently-shadowed craters that are located there.
But until now, scientists were operating under the assumption that lunar water was only to be found in permanently shadowed craters. But thanks to NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), water has been observed on the sunlit side of the Moon for the first time. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed all across the lunar surface, and not limited to the dark corners.
Continue reading “NASA Announces the Discovery of Water in the Sunlit Parts of the Moon”
A new study shows how massive young stars create the kind of organic molecules that are necessary for life.
A team of researchers used an airborne observatory to examine the inner regions around two massive young stars. Along with water, they found things like ammonia and methane. These molecules are swirling around in a disk of material that surrounds the young stars.
That material is the same stuff that planets form from, and the study presents some new insights into how the stuff of life becomes incorporated into planets.
Continue reading “We’re Made of Starstuff. Especially From Extremely Massive Stars”
When NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto, studying the atmosphere was a key scientific objective. Most of what we know about the ice dwarf came from that flyby. That happened in July 2015, but it took over 15 months to send all the data home, and it’s taking even longer to analyze it.
Continue reading “Astronomers Continue to Analyze Pluto’s Atmosphere”