2015 – Page 66 – Astronomy Now

Hydrothermal activity in subsurface ocean of Saturn’s moon Enceladus

12 March 2015 Astronomy Now

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft finds the first evidence of active hot-water chemistry beyond planet Earth on Saturn’s ocean moon Enceladus — results that have important implications for the habitability of icy worlds.

Pluto-bound probe tweaks its trajectory

12 March 2015 Stephen Clark

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft fine-tuned its path toward Pluto on Tuesday, firing its rocket thrusters for 93 seconds to aim for a fleeting flyby of the distant dwarf planet July 14.

Sun emits significant solar flare

12 March 2015 Astronomy Now

On March 11th at 4:22 pm GMT, the Sun emitted a powerful solar flare that registered 2.2 on the X-class scale. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the event in stunning detail.

The Moon meets Saturn in the claws of the Scorpion

11 March 2015 Ade Ashford

The 20-day-old waning gibbous Moon has a close encounter with ringed planet Saturn in northern Scorpius in the pre-dawn hours of Thursday, March 12th.

Dwarf galaxy’s gamma-rays hint at dark matter

11 March 2015 Astronomy Now

An excess of gamma rays detected coming from a recently discovered dwarf galaxy named Reticulum 2, which is 98,000 light years from Earth, could provide researchers with clues about dark matter, which is the mysterious stuff that makes up most of the Universe.

New dwarf galaxies discovered in orbit around the Milky Way

11 March 2015 Astronomy Now

Astronomers have discovered a ‘treasure trove’ of rare dwarf satellite galaxies orbiting our own Milky Way. The closest is about 95,000 light-years away, while the most distant is more than a million light-years away.

Planets Mars and Uranus meet in the evening sky

11 March 2015 Ade Ashford

Exactly a week after its close encounter with dazzling Venus, outer planet Uranus lies close to Mars on the evening of Wednesday, March 11th — but you’ll need to time your observation carefully in the dusk twilight twilight to ensure success.

Mysterious phenomena in a gigantic galaxy-cluster collision

10 March 2015 Astronomy Now

Researchers using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) have produced the most detailed image yet of an ongoing collision of galaxy clusters in a region called Abell 2256, revealing that unexpected processes are at work in such encounters.

Venus revealed in high-resolution radar images from Earth

10 March 2015 Astronomy Now

By combining the powerful radar transmitter of the Arecibo Observatory and the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) — the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope — astronomers were able to penetrate the visually opaque atmospheric veil of Venus to make remarkably detailed images of the surface of the planet without leaving Earth.

Reanalysis of data suggests ‘habitable’ planet GJ 581d really could exist

9 March 2015 Astronomy Now

A report published in Science has dismissed claims made last year that the first super-Earth planet discovered in the habitable zone of a distant star was actually just noise in the data caused by starspots masquerading as planets.