Astronomy Now Online

Paper probes pulsar pair
April 30: The only known gravitationally bound pair of pulsars—extremely dense, spinning stars that beam radio waves—may be pirouetting around each other in an intricate dance.
   FULL STORY
Hubble witnesses demise in ice and fire
April 29: The Bug Nebula, NGC 6302, is one of the brightest and most extreme planetary nebulae known. At its centre lies a superhot, dying star smothered in a blanket of hailstones. A new Hubble image reveals fresh detail in the wings of this cosmic butterfly.
   FULL STORY
Spying the surface of Titan
April 25: New images of unsurpassed clarity have been obtained with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope of formations on the surface of Titan, the largest moon in the Saturnian system.
   FULL STORY
Four ways to see Saturn
April 24: A montage of Cassini images, taken in four different regions of the spectrum from ultraviolet to near-infrared, demonstrates that there is more to Saturn than meets the eye. Cassini is two months away from entering orbit around Saturn.
   FULL STORY
Researcher predicts Jupiter spots will disappear
April 23: If a University of California, Berkeley, physicist's vision of Jupiter is correct, the giant planet will be in for a major global temperature shift over the next decade as most of its large vortices disappear.
   FULL STORY
Lure of the rings
April 22: Resembling a diamond-encrusted bracelet, a ring of brilliant blue star clusters wraps around the yellowish nucleus of what was once a normal spiral galaxy in this new image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
   FULL STORY
Chandra reveals two faces of supernova power
April 21: The Chandra X-ray Observatory has clearly shown two aspects of the enormous power released when a massive star explodes. An implosion crushed material into an extremely dense neutron star, triggering an explosion that sent a shock wave rumbling through space at speeds in excess of 5 million miles per hour.
   FULL STORY
Intermediate mass black hole mystery resolved
April 19: New research solved the mystery of how a black hole, with the mass more than several hundreds times larger than that of our Sun, could be formed in the nearby starburst galaxy, M82.
   FULL STORY
Comet observed crashing into distant star
April 19: Evidence that a comet-like body with a diameter of at least 100 kilometres fell into a massive, very young star has been obtained by a team of astronomers at Penn State University using the 9.2-metre Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas.
   FULL STORY
Cassini spots Saturn moons
April 17: Cassini has sighted Prometheus and Pandora, the two F-ring-shepherding moons whose unpredictable orbits both fascinate scientists and wreak havoc on the ring. The moons, which were discovered in images returned by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1980, are in chaotic orbits that can change when the moons get very close to each other.
   FULL STORY
SuperWASP begins search for thousands of new planets
April 16: April 16th saw a consortium of astronomers celebrating the commissioning of the SuperWASP facility at the Spanish Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, Canary Islands, designed to detect planets outside our own solar system.
   FULL STORY
Cosmic magnifying glass reveals distant planet
April 15: Like Sherlock Holmes holding a magnifying glass to unveil hidden clues, modern day astronomers used cosmic magnifying effects to reveal a planet orbiting a distant star.
   FULL STORY
Hubble observes planetoid Sedna as mystery deepens
April 14: Astronomers poring over 35 Hubble Space Telescope images of the solar system's farthest known object, unofficially named Sedna, are surprised that the object does not appear to have a companion moon of any substantial size.
   FULL STORY
   READ EARLIER STORY
Invisible giants exposed in new Spitzer image
April 14: Hidden behind a curtain of dusty darkness lurks one of the most violent pockets of star birth in our galaxy. Called DR21, this stellar nursery is so draped in cosmic dust that it appears invisible to the human eye.
   FULL STORY
SOHO sees its 750th comet
April 11: The joint European/NASA SOHO solar observatory spacecraft has discovered its 750th comet. The finding was made by the German amateur astronomer Sebastian Honig, one of the most successful SOHO comet-hunters. It was a part of the Kreutz family of "sungrazing" comets, which usually evaporate in the hot solar atmosphere.
   FULL STORY
Cassini observes merging Saturnian storms
April 8: Merging is one of the distinct features of storms in giant planet atmospheres. Only a month and a half into its long approach to Saturn, the Cassini spacecraft captured two storms, each a swirling mass of clouds and gas, in the act of coalescing during March and April.
   FULL STORY
Search for near-Earth asteroids heads south
April 6: The hunt for asteroids on a collision course with Earth has been largely limited to the Northern Hemisphere. But last week astronomers took the search for Earth-threatening asteroids to southern skies with a refurbished telescope at the Australian National University's Siding Spring Observatory.
   FULL STORY
Milky Way past was more turbulent than known
April 6: A team of astronomers from Denmark, Switzerland and Sweden has achieved a major breakthrough in our understanding of the Milky Way, the galaxy in which we live. After more than 1,000 nights of observations spread over 15 years, they have determined the spatial motions of more than 14,000 solar-like stars residing in the neighbourhood of the Sun.
   FULL STORY
Saturn moon casts 'once-in-a-lifetime' shadow
April 5: A rare celestial event was captured by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory as Titan — Saturn's largest moon and the only moon in the Solar System with a thick atmosphere — crossed in front of the X-ray bright Crab Nebula. The X-ray shadow cast by Titan allowed astronomers to make the first X-ray measurement of the extent of its atmosphere.
   FULL STORY
 
New quasar studies set stringent limit
April 3: Careful analysis of new data obtained using the UVES spectrograph on Kueyen, one of the 8.2-metre telescopes of ESO's Very Large Telescope array at Paranal (Chile), has provided the strongest astronomical constraints to date on a possible variation of the "fine structure constant."
   FULL STORY
Detailed VLT images of the largest moon in the solar system
April 1: A team of French astronomers has recently used the state of-the-art NACO adaptive optics system on ESO's Very Large Telescope to map Titan by means of near-infrared images and to search for changes in the dense atmosphere. The newly acquired images show details of the order of 200 km and reveal new features in the atmosphere.
   FULL STORY
Hunt for extrasolar Earth-like planets intensifies
April 1: An international group of astronomers are about to continue their hunt for extrasolar planets with an enhanced world-wide telescope network in May. They are hoping to secure firm evidence for the existence of Earth-mass planets orbiting stars other than the Sun, which has so far eluded astronomers.
   FULL STORY
Calculating the odds of other habitable 'Earths'
April 1:  More than 100 planetary systems have already been discovered around distant stars. How many of the known exoplanetary systems might contain habitable Earth-type planets? Perhaps half of them, according to a team using computer modelling to calculate the likelihood of any 'Earths' existing in the so-called habitable zone.
   FULL STORY
Dozens of 'mini-galaxies' discovered by astronomers
April 1:  A new survey made with the Anglo-Australian Telescope has revealed dozens of previously unsuspected miniature galaxies in the nearby Fornax galaxy cluster. They belong to a class of galaxies dubbed "ultra-compact dwarfs."
   FULL STORY