Space bears witness to a constant stream of star births. Whole star clusters are often formed at the same time — and within a comparatively short period. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg have proposed a new mechanism that relies on the interplay between magnetic fields and gravitation to explain this quick formation, investigating a filament of gas and dust which also includes the well-known Orion Nebula.
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows star clusters encircling a galaxy, like bees buzzing around a hive. The hive in question is the edge-on lenticular galaxy NGC 5308, located just under 100 million light-years away in the constellation of Ursa Major. On 9 October 1996, one of NGC 5308’s aging stars exploded as a spectacular Type la supernova.
Physicists and astronomers from the University of Texas at Arlington have used advanced software to accurately date lyric poet Sappho’s “Midnight Poem,” which describes the Pleiades star cluster in the constellation of Taurus having set at around midnight, when supposedly observed by her from the Greek island of Lesbos more than 2,500 years ago.
There is a delicious irony that ‘finding’ the brightest astronomical object in the sky is associated with the greatest danger — if one were to attempt using a conventional finder to point a suitably filtered telescope at the Sun, that is. Altair Astro’s Solar Finder permits simple, safe and swift alignment of your solar telescope, says reviewer Steve Ringwood.
Like sending sensors up into a hurricane, NASA has flown four spacecraft through an invisible maelstrom in space, called magnetic reconnection. Magnetic reconnection is one of the prime drivers of space radiation and so it is a key factor in the quest to learn more about our space environment and protect our spacecraft and astronauts as we explore farther and farther from our home planet.
A sequence of images taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows rotation of Comet 252P/LINEAR on 4 April 2016, roughly two weeks after the icy visitor came within 3.3 million miles of Earth, or about 14 times the distance between our planet and the Moon. These observations also represent the closest celestial object Hubble has observed, other than the Moon.
Astronomers recently found that a galaxy about 30 million light-years away nicknamed Leoncino, or “little lion,” contains the lowest level of heavy chemical elements, or “metals,” ever observed in a gravitationally bound system of stars. The elemental make-up of metal-poor galaxies is very close to that of the early universe.
Astronomers have observed the debris field from the supernova of 1572, now known as Tycho’s supernova remnant, with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the NSF’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). By combining the X-ray data with some 30 years of observations in radio waves, astronomers have also produced a movie showing the expansion from the explosion is still continuing 444 years later.
Some of the world’s leading amateur and professional astronomers are meeting on 12-13 May to prepare for a campaign of ground-based global observations in support of NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter. Delegates from 13 countries in Europe and around the world are meeting at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in Nice, France.
A four-planet system orbiting the star Kepler-223 in the constellation Cygnus is actually a rarity: Its planets, all miniature Neptunes nestled close to the star, are orbiting in a unique resonance that has been locked in for billions of years. For every three orbits of the outermost planet, the second orbits four times, the third six times and the innermost eight times.
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