Archive – Page 334 – Astronomy Now

MAVEN spacecraft’s first deep dip into Martian atmosphere

21 February 2015 Astronomy Now

NASA’s MAVEN mission has just completed the first of five deep-dip manoeuvres, lowering its closest approach to Mars to just 125 kilometres (78 miles), which will yield valuable data about the upper atmosphere of the Red Planet.

Space telescopes measure speed and shape of ultra-fast quasar winds

20 February 2015 Astronomy Now

Astronomers using NASA and ESA X-ray space telescopes discover that PDS 456, an extremely bright black hole known as a quasar more than 2 billion light-years away, sustains winds that carry more energy every second than is emitted by more than a trillion suns.

New Horizons spots Pluto’s small moons

19 February 2015 Astronomy Now

Exactly 85 years after Clyde Tombaugh’s historic discovery of Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft set to encounter the icy dwarf planet this summer is providing its first views of the small moons orbiting Pluto.

The UK under a curtain of aurora

19 February 2015 Astronomy Now

NASA astronaut Terry Virts captured this stunning image of the United Kingdom, Ireland and Scandinavia on a moonlit night beneath an amazing curtain of aurora.

Does dark matter cause mass extinctions and geologic upheavals?

19 February 2015 Astronomy Now

Research conducted at New York University suggests that the Solar System’s movement through concentrations of galactic dark matter may perturb the orbits of comets and cause additional heating in the Earth’s core, both of which could be connected with mass extinction events.

Sun’s close encounter with Scholz’s Star

18 February 2015 Astronomy Now

Astronomers using large telescopes in South Africa and Chile identify the closest known flyby of a star to our Solar System: a low-mass star system nicknamed “Scholz’s Star” that passed through the Oort Cloud 70,000 years ago.

Dawn captures sharper images of Ceres

17 February 2015 Astronomy Now

Now less than three weeks away from its historic rendezvous with dwarf planet Ceres, the latest images from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft show a myriad of craters and mysterious bright spots on the tiny world.

Mystery plumes in Martian atmosphere baffle scientists

17 February 2015 Astronomy Now

Research just published in Nature describes two bright, extremely high-altitude plumes observed on Mars by amateur astronomers in March and April 2012, but attempts at explaining the phenomena defy our current understanding of the Martian upper atmosphere.

Photos from Rosetta’s Valentine’s Day comet close-up

17 February 2015 Stephen Clark

Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft — six months into its research mission at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko — made its closest flyby of the comet’s boulder-strewn nucleus Saturday, capturing new photos and measurements to help scientists unravel how the duck-shaped body is evolving on its orbit around the sun.

ALMA sees super stellar nurseries at heart of starburst galaxy

16 February 2015 Astronomy Now

Starburst galaxies transmute gas into new stars up to 1,000 times faster than typical spiral galaxies like the Milky Way. To try and understand why, an international team of astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimetre Array (ALMA) to dissect a cluster of star-forming clouds at the heart of NGC 253 — one of the nearest starburst galaxies.