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Articles in 'Astronomy' (Page 2)
Astrophysicist: White dwarfs could be fertile ground for other Earths
— 31 Mar 2011 15:03Planet hunters have found hundreds of planets outside the solar system in the last decade, though it is unclear whether even one might be habitable. But it could be that the best place to look for planets that can support life is around dim, dying stars called white dwarfs…
When is an asteroid not an asteroid?
— 30 Mar 2011 17:37On March 29, 1807, German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers spotted Vesta as a pinprick of light in the sky. Two hundred and four years later, as NASA's Dawn spacecraft prepares to begin orbiting this intriguing world, scientists now know how special this world is, even if there has been some debate on how to classify it…
The rose-red glow of star formation
— 30 Mar 2011 16:31The object dominating this image may resemble a pool of spilled blood, but rather than being associated with death, such regions of ionised hydrogen - known as HII regions - are sites of creation with high rates of recent star birth. NGC 371 is an example of this; it is an open cluster surrounded by a nebula. The stars in open clusters all originate from the same diffuse HII region, and over time the majority of the hydrogen is used up by star formation, leaving behind a shell of hydrogen such as the one in this image, along with a cluster of hot young stars…
Integral spots matter a millisecond from doom
— 28 Mar 2011 18:07ESA's Integral gamma-ray observatory has spotted extremely hot matter just a millisecond before it plunges into the oblivion of a black hole. But is it really doomed? These unique observations suggest that some of the matter may be making a great escape…
A very cool pair of brown dwarfs
— 28 Mar 2011 17:42Brown dwarfs are essentially failed stars: they lack enough mass for gravity to trigger the nuclear reactions that make stars shine. The newly discovered brown dwarf, identified as CFBDSIR 1458+10B, is the dimmer member of a binary brown dwarf system located just 75 light-years from Earth…
Cassini spacecraft observes seasonal rains on Titan
— 18 Mar 2011 14:24As spring continues to unfold on Saturn, April showers on the planet's largest moon, Titan, have brought methane rain to its equatorial deserts, as revealed in images captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft…
The drama of starbirth
— 16 Mar 2011 13:12The star-forming region NGC 6729 is part of one of the closest stellar nurseries to the Earth and hence one of the best studied. This new image from ESO's Very Large Telescope gives a close-up view of a section of this strange and fascinating region. The data were selected from the ESO archive by Sergey Stepanenko as part of the Hidden Treasures competition. Sergey's picture of NGC 6729 was ranked third in the competition…
MESSENGER spacecraft to swing into orbit around Mercury
— 15 Mar 2011 21:20At 8:45 p.m. EDT on March 17, the MESSENGER spacecraft will execute a 15-minute manoeuvre that will place it into orbit around Mercury, making it the first craft ever to do so, and initiating a one-year science campaign to understand the innermost planet…
Speed demon creates a shock
— 11 Mar 2011 16:10Just as some drivers obey the speed limit while others treat every road as if it were the Autobahn, some stars move through space faster than others. NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, captured this image of the star Alpha Camelopardalis, or Alpha Cam, in astronomer-speak, speeding through the sky like a motorcyclist zipping through rush-hour traffic. The supergiant star Alpha Cam is the bright star in the middle of this image, surrounded on one side by an arc-shaped cloud of dust and gas - a bow shock - which is coloured red in this infrared view…
The most distant mature galaxy cluster
— 9 Mar 2011 20:20'We have measured the distance to the most distant mature cluster of galaxies ever found,' says the lead author of the study in which the observations from ESO's VLT have been used, Raphael Gobat (CEA, Paris). 'The surprising thing is that when we look closely at this galaxy cluster it doesn't look young - many of the galaxies have settled down and don't resemble the usual star-forming galaxies seen in the early Universe'…
Ghostly 'spokes' puff out from Saturn's ring's
Exoplanets clue to sun's curious chemistry