The focus of Maria Golia’s book is not in the scientific details, but squarely on the place of meteorites in various aspects of human culture. Interspersed among the various sections are full-page images of meteorites as viewed under the microscope. “This is an extremely well-researched book … renewed my interest in meteorites in general,” says reviewer John Rowlands.
A team of astronomers in the UK, USA and Australia have found a planet, until now thought to be a free floating, in a huge, 900,000-year orbit around its star. Incredibly the object, designated as 2MASS J2126, is about 1 trillion (1 million million) kilometres from the star, or about 7,000 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
How did the universe begin? And what came before the Big Bang? Astrophysicists have asked these questions ever since discovering that our universe is expanding. New research suggests that subatomic heavy particles act as “primordial standard clocks,” offering a way of probing the beginning of space and time to determine which of the competing cosmological theories is correct.
The edge-on spiral galaxy captured in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image lies about one billion light-years away in the constellation of Eridanus. In 2003, the galaxy was discovered to possess giant jets of superheated gas emitting in the radio part of the spectrum. These jets have long been associated with the cores of giant elliptical galaxies, but are rare in spirals.
Humanity has visited Uranus only once, and that was exactly 30 years ago. NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft got its closest look at the mysterious, distant, gaseous planet on 24 January 1986. The probe sent back stunning images of the coldest planet known in our solar system and its moons during the flyby, which allowed for about 5½ hours of close study.
Dr Brian May will bring a new dimension to the conference programme at European AstroFest this year when he takes the audience on a stereoscopic adventure into space. Using cutting-edge 3D projection technology, Brian will explain how stereo photography has been used to capture the wonders of the Universe, from Victorian-era images of the Moon to present day space probes exploring the far-flung regions of our Solar System.
An international team of astronomers led by Ivan Zolotukhin from Lomonosov Moscow State University is close to understanding one of the most important mysteries of modern astronomy — so-called intermediate-mass black holes. The researchers acknowledge the invaluable assistance of volunteer Russian computer programmers in the search.
A team of researchers has observed the brightest, ultra metal-poor star ever discovered. (To astronomers, metals are elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.) The star is therefore a rare relic from the Milky Way’s formative years. As such, it offers astronomers a precious opportunity to explore the origin of the first stars that sprung to life within our galaxy.
According to a team of astronomers led by Dr. Keith Bannister of CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science Division in Australia, invisible noodle- or shell-shaped plasma structures could be floating around in the Milky Way. These structures, which focus and defocus radio waves from distant sources such as quasars, could radically change our ideas about the Galaxy’s interstellar gas.
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