Phenomenally durable crystals called zircons are used to date some of the earliest and most dramatic cataclysms of the solar system, such as the late heavy bombardment that created hellish surface conditions on the young Earth and Moon about 4 billion years ago. Now a study of zircons from a gigantic meteorite impact in South Africa casts doubt on the methods used to date lunar impacts.
According to observations from the Tihany Magnetic Observatory in Hungary, the indices used by scientists to assess the Sun’s geomagnetic perturbations to the Earth are unable to detect some of these events, which could put both power supply and communication networks at risk. The Tihany Magnetic Observatory registered a solar storm similar to the largest one ever recorded while other observatories were completely unaware of the event.
CCDs are incredible devices, gobbling photons that have travelled the vastness of space with great efficiency. Their Achilles heel is to also accept spurious signals from the immediate vicinity — within their own traitorous circuitry. Steve Ringwood investigates a CCD cooling chamber that will reduce a camera’s noise and increase its efficiency for both daytime and nocturnal imaging.
It seems that the more we see of Pluto, the more fascinating it gets. This latest image, from the heart of Pluto’s heart feature, shows the plains’ enigmatic cellular pattern as well as unusual clusters of small pits and troughs. Adding to the intrigue is that even at this resolution of 250 metres, no impact craters are seen, testifying to the region’s extreme geologic youth.
NGC 4639 is a beautiful example of a type of galaxy known as a barred spiral. It lies over 70 million light-years away in the constellation of Virgo and is one of about 1500 galaxies that make up the Virgo Cluster. But NGC 4639 also conceals a dark secret in its core — a massive black hole that is consuming the surrounding gas and known as an active galactic nucleus (AGN).
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has begun returning its best-ever views of the northern extremes of Saturn’s icy, ocean-bearing moon Enceladus. Scientists expected the north polar region of Enceladus to be heavily cratered, based on low-resolution images from the Voyager mission, but the new high-resolution Cassini images show a landscape of stark contrasts.
A giant mound near the Moon’s south pole appears to be a volcanic structure unlike any other found on the lunar surface, according to new research by Brown University geologists. The formation, known as Mafic Mound, stands about 800 metres tall and 75 kilometres (47 miles) across, smack in the middle of a giant impact crater known as the South Pole-Aitken Basin.
The New Horizons team described a wide range of findings about the Pluto system in its first research paper published today — just three months after NASA’s historic first exploration of the dwarf planet. New Horizons has revealed a degree of diversity and complexity on Pluto and its moons that few expected in the frigid outer reaches of the solar system.
In the small hours of Friday, 16 October, innermost planet Mercury reaches its greatest westerly elongation from the Sun. For those of you in the UK with a flat, unobscured eastern horizon and willing to get up an hour before sunrise, the next few days provide your best opportunity to see Mercury from the Northern Hemisphere during 2015.
In general, the larger a galaxy’s mass, the higher its rate of forming new stars. However, every now and then a galaxy will display a burst of newly-formed stars that shine brighter than the rest. Researchers using the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA) have found that galaxies forming stars at extreme rates 9 billion years ago were more efficient than average galaxies today.
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