Archive

Hubble captures extremely remote galaxy cluster

16 April 2018 William Harwood

The Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3 captured an image of a massive galaxy cluster some six billion light years from Earth, part of a program to find targets for the James Webb Space Telescope.

Juno peers beneath Jupiter’s cloud tops, revealing wonders

11 April 2018 William Harwood

Using infrared data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft, scientists have assembled a 3D map of Jupiter’s north polar region, showing details of a huge central cyclone and eight surrounding storms. Juno also is shedding light on Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field.

Jupiter’s red spot might be shrinking, but it’s still great!

10 April 2018 William Harwood

The Juno probe’s public-outreach camera routinely captures stunning views of Jupiter cloudtops and storms, including the Great Red Spot, seen here in an image processed by graphic artist Seán Doran. The GRS has been shrinking for years, but it remains easily the largest storm in the solar system and one still worthy of its name.

Globular clusters may host multiple generations of black hole mergers

10 April 2018 Astronomy Now

Dense star clusters may serve as breeding grounds for successive generations of black hole mergers, resulting in gargantuan holes, generating gravitational waves that researchers hope to detect.

Super-cooled SQUIDs may help detect elusive dark matter

10 April 2018 Astronomy Now

Super-cooled quantum detectors have demonstrated the sensitivity needed to detect telltale microwave photons from dark matter axions, if they exist, kicking off the latest high-tech hunt for the elusive particles.

Astronomers locate isolated neutron star beyond our galaxy

9 April 2018 Astronomy Now

New images from ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and other telescopes reveal a rich landscape of stars and glowing clouds of gas in one of our closest neighbouring galaxies, the Small Magellanic Cloud. The pictures have allowed astronomers to identify an elusive stellar corpse buried among filaments of gas left behind by a 2000-year-old supernova explosion.

Saturn’s clouds run deep, rings may rain organics

6 April 2018 Stephen Clark

Saturn’s clouds have roots deeper inside the planet’s atmosphere than scientists previously thought, and Saturn’s rings — now believed to have formed in the last 200 million years — appear to be raining organic molecules down on the planet, according to observations made by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft last year in the final weeks of its mission.