News: February 2009
Coloured quasars suggest 'smoky' Universe
Hold your breath: we may be living in a smoky Universe that dims light from distant objects such as quasars, or so say astronomers working on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).
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Migrating giants turned asteroids into missiles
The migration of Jupiter and Saturn could have turned asteroids in the early Solar System into missiles that pelted the inner planets. This is the interpretation of a team of scientists who discovered that asteroids in the Asteroid Belt are missing.
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Watching Venus glow
in the dark
An eerie glow has been observed in the night time atmosphere of Venus that shows Earth's neighbouring planet as a temperamental place of high winds and turbulence.
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Turbulence triggers birth of massive stars
By probing the newborn stars in the constellation Serpens Cauda, scientists using the Submillimeter Array have captured the first moments of massive star formation.
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Dust factory found
around Cas A
A team of astronomers have found that copious amounts of dust are being produced within the dead remains of the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant.
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Hubble's Next Discovery - You Decide
Members of the public have one week left to determine where to point modern astronomy's most famous telescope.
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'Earth-seeking' Kepler
ready for launch
The first space mission with the capability of finding Earth-like planets is ready for launch on 5 March at 15:48 GMT.
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Comet Lulin visits inner Solar System
On 24 February Comet Lulin will make its first visit to the inner Solar System, streaking past the Earth at a distance of 38 million miles, or 160 times further than the Moon.
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New recipe for
dwarf galaxies
NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer has uncovered a new recipe for making dwarf galaxies using pristine gas left over from the early Universe.
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Fermi's record breaking gamma-ray burst
The latest gamma-ray burst to blast NASA's Fermi space telescope arrived from a distance of 12 billion light years, had the greatest total energy, the fastest motions and the highest energy initial emissions seen to date.
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UK launches International Year of Astronomy
Members of the media and representatives of the UK's astronomy community gathered at London's Royal Observatory Greenwich last night to mark the occasion of the International Year of Astronomy 2009.
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Jupiter mission given
poll position
NASA and ESA officials have decided to first go ahead with an ambitious mission to Jupiter and Europa, following up with another mission to visit Saturn's moons Titan and Enceladus.
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxies
The doors to Galaxy Zoo 2 are officially opened today, calling on the public to delve deeper into 250,000 galaxies in the search for the weird and wonderful.
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South Pole Telescope to probe first moments of Universe
Scientists using the South Pole Telescope are set to put the theory of cosmic inflation to its most stringent observational test so far, by seeking out gravity waves.
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Best image ever of
Carina Nebula
Using the modest 2.2-metre telescope at La Silla in Chile, European Southern Observatory astronomers have taken the best image to date of the Carina Nebula (NGC 3372), which lies 7,500 light years away.
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Radio finds unknown molecules in space
A sea change in the way radio astronomy is conducted has been responsible for finding a whole swathe of unidentified molecules in space.
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Early stars formed
galactic 'jam'
Stars in the early Universe, particularly in ultra-compact dwarf galaxies (UCDs), could have been crammed a thousand times closer together than they are today, according to a team of scientists from the University of Bonn in Germany.
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Scientists see
"Cosmic Dawn"
Using computer simulations, scientists have predicted what the Universe would have looked like 500 million years after the
big bang.
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Swift and Fermi probe gamma ray fireworks
Astronomers using NASA's Swift satellite and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have observed high-energy flares emanating from a neutron star 30,000 light years away.
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Powerful new technique to measure asteroids
A team of French and Italian astronomers have devised a new method for measuring the size and shape of asteroids that are too small or too far away for traditional techniques, increasing the number of asteroids that can be measured by a factor of several hundred.
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Hubble's deep view of an anaemic galaxy
The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a rare spiral galaxy in the Coma Cluster that has been described by scientists as "anaemic". Hubble shows the fine structure of galaxy NGC 4921, set against a rich background of remote galaxies spawned in the Universe's early years.
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Craters highlight Martian tilt and water
The erosion of craters on Mars is providing researchers at the Planetary Science Institute (PSI) in Tucson, Arizona, with fresh new evidence about the role that water-ice plays in the geology of the red planet.
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AstroFest is here!
As AstroFest fever sweeps across the nation - faster than the recent snow flurries - and the final preparations for the UK’s biggest Astronomy extravaganza are put in place, we’ll be taking you to the centre of the action through our special AstroFest blog.
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CoRoT discovers most Earth-like exoplanet yet
The CoRoT space telescope has detected an exoplanet less than twice the size of Earth orbiting a Sun-like star, and with a surface you could walk on, astronomers speculate.
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Supermassive black holes and galaxies evolved together
Using ground- and space-based telescopes, astronomers have uncovered new evidence to show that the most massive galaxies in the Universe and the supermassive black holes at their centres evolved together.
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