Archive – Page 199 – Astronomy Now

Moonrise from the International Space Station

4 October 2016 Astronomy Now

NASA Astronaut Kate Rubins on the International Space Station shared this image of Moonrise taken on 25 September 2016. The glow of Earth’s atmosphere and the aurora are also visible.

Milky Way’s most-mysterious star is even stranger than astronomers thought

4 October 2016 Astronomy Now

A star known as KIC 8462852 in the constellation Cygnus has been raising eyebrows both in and outside of the scientific community for the past year. In 2015 a team of astronomers announced that the star underwent a series of very brief, non-periodic dimming events while being monitored by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. A new study has deepened the mystery.

Millisecond pulsars in globular cluster 47 Tucanae

3 October 2016 Astronomy Now

Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars that emit electromagnetic radiation in a sweeping, lighthouse-like beam. They are dramatic, powerful probes of supernovae, their progenitor stars. Astronomers have measured the orbital parameters of four millisecond pulsars in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae and modelled their possible formation and evolution paths.

Hubble probes the core of galaxy NGC 247

3 October 2016 Astronomy Now

NGC 247 is a relatively small spiral galaxy in the southern constellation of Cetus (The Whale), part of the Sculptor Group around 11 million light-years from us. NGC 247 displays one particularly unusual and mysterious feature — an apparent void in the usual swarm of stars and H II regions in the northern part of its disc that spans almost a third of the galaxy’s total length.

Protoplanetary disc’s spiral arms embrace young star

1 October 2016 Astronomy Now

Swirling around the young star Elias 2-27 is a stunning spiral-shape pinwheel of dust. This striking feature, seen with the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA), is the product of density waves — gravitational perturbations in the star’s protoplanetary disc that produce sweeping arms reminiscent of a spiral galaxy, but on a much smaller scale.

Rosetta mission ends with comet touchdown

30 September 2016 Stephen Clark

Europe’s Rosetta mission ended its 12-year mission Friday with a slow-speed belly-flop on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, concluding an interplanetary odyssey that gave humanity a first close-up introduction to a class of objects which has stimulated imaginations for millennia.

Project scientist Matt Taylor speaks about Rosetta’s final moments

30 September 2016 Astronomy Now

The Rosetta project scientist Matt Taylor speaks on the emotion of witnessing the end of the Rosetta spacecraft as it descended to the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and looks forward to the scientific bounty contained in the huge volume of data collected over the last two years.

Camera scientist presents final images taken before Rosetta’s crash landing

30 September 2016 Astronomy Now

Holger Sierks, principal investigator for Rosetta’s OSIRIS camera presents the images from the final seconds of the mission just prior to touchdown on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Live coverage: Rosetta’s final hours

30 September 2016 Stephen Clark

Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft will close out a historic 4.9-billion-mile journey Friday with a slow-speed crash into the nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the tiny world it has studied for the last two years, capturing some of the mission’s best science data to help unravel the inner workings of the comet. Confirmation of the crash landing should arrive on Earth around 1218 BST.

Record-breaking extragalactic gamma-ray binary found

30 September 2016 Astronomy Now

Using data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and other facilities, an international team has found the first gamma-ray binary in another galaxy and the most luminous one ever seen. The dual-star system, dubbed LMC P3, contains a massive star and a crushed stellar core that interact to produce a cyclic flood of gamma rays.