Archive – Page 90 – Astronomy Now

Don’t miss Mercury in the eastern sky at dawn during August 2019

8 August 2019 Ade Ashford

Mercury attains a greatest elongation 19 degrees west of the Sun late on 9 August 2019, hence the innermost planet is a morning object. This means that early risers in the British Isles with clear skies have several opportunities to view Mercury between the first and third weeks of this month.

ALMA finds previously unseen ancestors of elliptical galaxies

7 August 2019 Astronomy Now

Astronomers using the ALMA radio telescopes have found a population of galaxies not seen in the deepest views of the Hubble Space Telescope.

A cosmic seagull soaring through space on wings of ionised gas

7 August 2019 Astronomy Now

The European Southern Observatory’s VLT Survey Telescope caught the Seagull Nebula in flight on the border between Canis Major and Monoceros 3,700 light years away, a vast assembly of hot gas and dust giving birth to new stars.

Another look at Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, courtesy of Juno

6 August 2019 Astronomy Now

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot may be shrinking, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at spectacular pictures from the Juno orbiter captured during a 21 July flyby.

A hot planet, shaped like a football, spews heavy metals

5 August 2019 William Harwood

The Hubble Space Telescope has detected iron and magnesium gas spewing from a hellish exoplanet being gravitationally warped by its nearby host star.

Iron-poor star hints at nature of first-generation suns

2 August 2019 Astronomy Now

Astronomers have found an exceptionally iron-poor star that may represent second-generation suns born in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang

LightSail team declares success in solar sail experiment

1 August 2019 Stephen Clark

The gentle push of sunlight is slowly changing the orbit of the Planetary Society’s crowd-funded LightSail 2 satellite after it unfurled a thin solar sail the size of a boxing ring last week, officials confirmed Wednesday.

Planet-hunting telescopes capture intriguing view of Centaurus A

1 August 2019 Astronomy Now

The SPECULOOS planet-hunting telescopes at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile captured a spectacular view of Centaurus A, a galaxy 11 million light years away harbouring the nearest active galactic nuclei, a supermassive black hole 100 million times more massive than the Sun.

Mars 2020 rover on track for launch next July

31 July 2019 Stephen Clark

The launch of NASA’s Mars 2020 rover is less than a year away, and the steady pace of work inside the craft’s pristine assembly hall in California is keeping the mission on schedule for liftoff from Cape Canaveral next July, despite growing costs, according to mission managers.

TESS helps astronomers pinpoint possibly habitable exoplanet

31 July 2019 Astronomy Now

Following a lead provided by the TESS planet-hunting spacecraft, astronomers have found two more worlds lurking in a solar system 31 light years from Earth.