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News: December 2008
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A Christmas cluster
The festive season has arrived for astronomers at the European Southern Observatory, in the form of a spectacular image of NGC 2264, which includes the sparkling blue baubles of the Christmas Tree star cluster.
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Did prehistoric asteroid smash stimulate life?
Microscopic meteorite fragments discovered in Scotland that fell 480 million years ago coincided with a time of dramatic upheaval on Earth.
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Rock varnish could benefit Martian bacteria
Naturally occurring rock varnish could offer suitable habitats for bacterial life on Mars, report scientists in this month’s issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research.
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Phoenix site may be in dry climate cycle phase
NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander could have visited the Red Planet during a particularly dry phase of climate, say scientists who presented their work at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco last week.
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The great escape of water from Venus
Venus Express has provided new clues that suggest how the planet lost its water, which could have once been as abundant as it is on Earth today.
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Dark energy’s galactic stranglehold seen
It dominates the Universe, accounting for 74 percent of its energy density. The mysterious, space-stretching force known as dark energy, which is accelerating the expansion of the Universe, could also be inhibiting the development of galaxies.
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Mars orbiter locates ‘missing’ carbonates
Scientists working with Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) data have spotted a long sought after mineral on the Martian surface and, with it, unexpected clues to the Red Planet's watery past.
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Cassini reveals Enceladus’ shifting terrain
The latest fly-bys of Saturn’s dynamic moon Enceladus have revealed new signs that the south polar surface changes over time in an eerily Earthlike fashion.
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Icy volcanism likely on Titan
According to the latest research presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco this week, cyrovolcanoes could be spewing a super-chilled liquid into Titan’s atmosphere.
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Water found 11 billion light years away
Astronomers have found the most distant occurrence of water yet seen in the Universe in a galaxy more than 11 billion light years from Earth, three billion years more distant than water has ever been detected before.
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What came before the
Big Bang?
A question that has been pondered by scientists and philosophers alike could soon be answered, thanks to a mathematical model that explains an anomaly in the early Universe.
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Dissecting a black hole with natural magnifying glasses
Combining the natural magnifying power of galactic lenses with ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers have scrutinised a supermassive black hole 10 billion light years away.
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Wobbly planets could reveal Earthlike moons
Instead of looking for potentially habitable planets around stars outside our Solar System, University College London astronomer David Kipping is searching for moons.
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Red giants to probe history of Milky Way
A new project based on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III will study more than 100,000 Milky Way red giant stars to help understand the formation history of our Galaxy.
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Spitzer seeks out Universe’s faintest stars
NASA’s Spitzer space telescope has hunted down a pair of twin brown dwarf stars, each just a millionth as bright as the Sun – the faintest stars found yet.
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Hubble finds carbon dioxide on exoplanet
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere of a hot jupiter planet, a crucial step towards finding the chemical tracers of extraterrestrial life in other solar systems.
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16 year study probes Milky Way’s black hole
By plotting the motions of stars around the Milky Way’s central region over a period of 16 years, astronomers have probed the nexus of forces thought to be controlled by the Galaxy’s supermassive black hole.
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Mars climate changes recorded in ancient rocks
Climate cycles persisting for millions of years have left their mark in thick stacks of sedimentary rock, and are caused by the regular variation in Mars's tilt, a phenomenon already known to control the Earth’s dip in and out of ice ages.
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Spitzer paints portrait of gaseous rivers flowing around stars
A new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows a turbulent star-forming region where rivers of gas and stellar winds are blowing out cavities in the dusty Swan nebula.
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UK Moon mission gets
green light
The UK-led MoonLITE mission that will see penetrator darts embedded into the lunar surface has been given the go ahead by the government to enter into an in-depth
‘Phase-A’ study.
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Students discover planet orbiting rapidly rotating
hot star
Three undergraduate students from Leiden University have discovered the first extrasolar planet orbiting a fast-rotating hot star.
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Brown dwarfs do form
like stars
Astronomers have uncovered strong evidence that brown dwarfs – the dividing line between stars and planets – form like stars.
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Hubble’s snow globe
of stars
Like a shaken snow globe of sparkling snow flakes frozen in time, Hubble has captured an instantaneous glimpse of the thousands of glittering stars moving about the globular cluster M13.
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Mars Science Laboratory delayed for two years
The launch of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory has slipped to 2011, two years after the original schedule, in order to allow further hardware testing to ensure a maximum science return.
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A new class of comet?
Lowell Observatory astronomer David Schleicher has uncovered a class of comet that bears extremely anomalous compositional characteristics, pinning its origin to just one of three places.
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Subaru sees new light from Tycho’s 16th century supernova
Astronomers using the Subaru Telescope have observed light echoes from Tycho’s Supernova Remnant that provide new insight into the exploding star’s origin and type.
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New view of
Omega Centauri
The European Southern Observatory has released a stunning new image of the “glittering giant of the southern skies”, Omega Centauri, the most massive of all our Galaxy’s globular clusters.
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NASA prepares for Juno mission to Jupiter
The first mission that will place a spacecraft in a highly elliptical polar orbit around Jupiter, Juno will help scientists to understand the giant planet’s formation, evolution and structure.
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