The first colour images of Pluto’s atmospheric hazes returned by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft last week — seen here backlit by the Sun — reveal that the hazes are blue. Also, in a second significant finding, New Horizons has detected numerous small, exposed regions of water ice on the dwarf planet.
With accessible prose and relentless curiosity, Chris Impey’s book reports on China’s plan to launch its own space station by 2020, proves that humans could survive on Mars, and unveils cutting-edge innovations poised to replace rockets at a fraction of the cost. “Beyond is a compelling book with great attention to detail and science that is awe inspiring — it is a stellar read indeed,” says reviewer Alex Green.
How did our modern picture of the universe come into being? Helge Kragh’s book tells this fascinating story in an unusual format that blends factual and fictional elements. The ‘interviewees’ are a collection of eminent twentieth century cosmologists, among them Einstein, Eddington, De Sitter, Hoyle, Arrhenius, Dirac and Schwarzschild. Reviewed by Ian Welland.
Piers Bizony’s book gives the reader an insight into the twenty-first century’s new era of human spaceflight with Virgin Galactic, SpaceX and more vying with traditional space agencies and emerging space-faring nations such as China. Reviewer Kulvinder Singh Chadha says that Bizony successfully captures what is happening right now in this generously-sized book with lush images aplenty.
Thanks to a lucky conjunction of two satellites, a ground-based array of all-sky cameras, and some spectacular aurorae boreales, researchers have uncovered evidence for an unexpected role that electrons have in creating the dancing aurorae. Though humans have been seeing aurorae for thousands of years, we have only recently begun to understand what causes them.
Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile have discovered never-before-seen moving features within the dusty disc surrounding the young, nearby star AU Microscopii. The fast-moving, wave-like structures are moving at 22,000 miles per hour — fast enough to escape the star’s gravitational pull.
On 6 October 1995, astronomers started a revolution with the discovery of 51 Pegasi b — the first planet found orbiting a Sun-like star beyond our solar system. As we celebrate the 20th anniversary of that momentous discovery, the current total of known exoplanets stands at 5,596. More than 1,000 of these were discovered by NASA’s Kepler mission.
This image is the last winner we have from the eleven categories in the Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition 2015 — that of using a robotic telescope. It shows the power of remote imaging, since Sebastian Voltmer in Germany used the iTelescope at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia to capture Comet C/2013 A1 passing very close to Mars on 19 October 2014.
Use this combination solar diagonal and blocking filter with a conventional refractor of 100mm aperture or less and you have an instant calcium K-line solar instrument, writes reviewer Steve Ringwood. With it you can see super-granulation on the Sun’s surface and other features outside the reach of hydrogen-alpha telescopes — all in complete safety.
Astronomers have long turned their telescopes to the wide swaths of interstellar medium to get a look at the formation and birth of stars. A team of international researchers has just released the most comprehensive images anyone has ever seen of the Milky Way’s cold interstellar gas clouds where new stars and solar systems are being born.
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