Archive – Page 169 – Astronomy Now

See the sharpest-ever view of giant Betelgeuse

30 June 2017 Astronomy Now

This orange blob shows the nearby star Betelgeuse, as seen by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. This is the first time that ALMA has ever observed the surface of a star and this first attempt has resulted in the highest-resolution image of Betelgeuse available.

First quarter Moon meets Jupiter and Spica in the evening sky

30 June 2017 Ade Ashford

Observer’s in the UK and Western Europe should look low to the southwest an hour after sunset on Friday, 30 June to glimpse the almost first quarter Moon a low-power binocular field of view to the right of Jupiter in bright twilight. The following night finds the waxing gibbous Moon forming a near isosceles triangle with the planet and first-magnitude star Spica in Virgo.

Mars rover Opportunity on walkabout near crater rim

28 June 2017 Astronomy Now

NASA’s senior Mars rover, Opportunity, is examining rocks at the edge of Endeavour Crater for signs that they may have been either transported by a flood or eroded in place by wind.

Astronomers detect orbital motion in pair of supermassive black holes

28 June 2017 Astronomy Now

Using the supersharp radio “vision” of the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array, astronomers have made the first detection of orbital motion in a pair of supermassive black holes in a galaxy some 750 million light-years from Earth.

Artificial brain helps Gaia catch speeding stars

27 June 2017 Astronomy Now

With the help of software that mimics a human brain, ESA’s Gaia satellite spotted six stars zipping at high speed from the centre of our galaxy to its outskirts. This could provide key information about some of the most obscure regions of the Milky Way.

Chandra samples galactic goulash

27 June 2017 Astronomy Now

What would happen if you took two galaxies and mixed them together over millions of years? A new image including data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory reveals the cosmic culinary outcome.

Jupiter’s “String of Pearls”

26 June 2017 Astronomy Now

This enhanced-color image of Jupiter’s bands of light and dark clouds was created by citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran using data from the JunoCam imager on NASA’s Juno spacecraft.

Hubble captures massive dead disc galaxy

25 June 2017 Astronomy Now

By combining the power of a “natural lens” in space with the capability of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers made a surprising discovery—the first example of a compact yet massive, fast-spinning, disk-shaped galaxy that stopped making stars only a few billion years after the big bang.

Seeing double in the summer sky

24 June 2017 Ade Ashford

With astronomical twilight lasting all night around the Northern Hemisphere summer solstice for stargazers in the UK, what does the deep-sky observer do when the sky never gets truly dark? Fortunately, there are many beautiful double and multiple stars to seek out while most nebulae are off limits.

The curious case of the warped Kuiper Belt

22 June 2017 Astronomy Now

An unknown, unseen “planetary mass object” may lurk in the outer reaches of our solar system, according to new research on the orbits of minor planets to be published in the Astronomical Journal. This object would be different from — and much closer than — the so-called Planet Nine, a planet whose existence yet awaits confirmation.