Archive – Page 113 – Astronomy Now

LIGO and VIRGO announce four new gravitational-wave detections

3 December 2018 Astronomy Now

The LIGO and VIRGO collaboration has announced the detection of gravitational waves from four previously unseen black hole mergers, including one that happened nine billion years ago

Counting all the photons in the universe (spoiler alert: it’s a big number)

3 December 2018 Astronomy Now

Studying interactions between extragalactic light and gamma rays emitted by blazars has allowed astronomers to calculate how much light has been emitted across the age of the cosmos.

NASA thrilled InSight landed on flat, rock-free ‘sandbox’ on Mars

2 December 2018 Astronomy Now

Analysis of photographs showing the area around NASA’s InSight Mars lander shows no signs of any large rocks or depressions that might affect placement of the spacecraft’s science instruments.

Hubble spots thousands of globular clusters in Coma galaxy group

2 December 2018 Astronomy Now

Archived images collected by the Hubble Space Telescope across a variety of projects allowed astronomers to spot more than 22,000 globular clusters in the Coma galaxy cluster.

See Mars get very close to Neptune at dusk on 7 December

2 December 2018 Ade Ashford

Observers in the British Isles looking due south close to 6pm GMT on Friday, 7 December will find magnitude +0.1 planet Mars about 30 degress, or a span and a half of an outstretched hand at arm’s length, above the horizon. What you won’t see unless you have binoculars or a small telescope is that magnitude +7.9 outermost planet Neptune lies just one-tenth of a degree from the Red Planet.

Type 1a supernova, caught in the act of exploding, raises new questions

30 November 2018 Astronomy Now

Astronomers have captured the light from a white dwarf exploding in a Type 1a supernova, shedding light on the mechanism powering the blasts while raising fresh questions.

A tangled web this supernova weaves

30 November 2018 Astronomy Now

Tangled clouds of gas from a destroyed star can be seen weaving their way through space in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the remnants of a Type 1a supernova that consumed a white dwarf in a once glorious blaze of light. Such supernovae are critical to measuring cosmic distances.

Hubble peers into a globular cluster on the outskirts of the LMC

28 November 2018 Astronomy Now

An unusual globular cluster on the outskirts of the Large Magellanic Cloud, seen here in an image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, features an unusual mix of young an old stars, possibly the result of an encounter with a giant gas cloud in the distant past.

Time-lapse shows Beta Pictoris b sailing through its orbit

27 November 2018 Astronomy Now

ESO’s Very Large Telescope has captured a remarkable series of images showing the hot, young exoplanet Beta Pictoris b moving in its orbit from one side of its star to the other.

NASA’s InSight mission lands on Mars to study planet’s hidden interior

26 November 2018 Stephen Clark

NASA’s InSight spacecraft plunged into the rarefied atmosphere of Mars at a speed of more than 12,000 mph Monday and braked to a gentle touchdown, setting the stage for a two-year surface mission to probe the planet’s deep interior.