Based on computer simulations, astrophysicists at the University of Bern conclude that comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko did not obtain its duck-like form during the formation of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago. Although it does contain primordial material, they are able to show that the comet in its present form is hardly more than a billion years old.
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows NGC 4789A, a dwarf irregular galaxy in the constellation of Coma Berenices. It certainly lives up to its name — the stars that call this galaxy home are smeared out across the sky in an apparently disorderly and irregular jumble, giving NGC 4789A a far more subtle and abstract appearance than its glitzy spiral and elliptical cousins.
In a first-of-its-kind collaboration, NASA’s Spitzer and Swift space telescopes joined forces to observe a microlensing event, when a distant star brightens due to the gravitational field of at least one foreground cosmic object. This technique is useful for finding low-mass bodies orbiting stars, such as planets. In this case, the observations revealed a brown dwarf.
The atmosphere of the planet Saturn has a wider, more intense jet stream than all the planets in the solar system. Winds gusting at speeds of up to 1,025 miles per hour blow from west to east in the equatorial atmosphere, thirteen times the strength of the most destructive hurricane force winds that form on the Earth’s equator.
A team of scientists and engineers led by Princeton University researchers recently reported the successful operation of a new instrument for the 8.2-metre Subaru Telescope at the Mauna Kea Observatory on Hawaii that will allow astronomers to make direct observations and take spectra of planets orbiting nearby stars.
When a full Moon makes its closest pass to Earth in its orbit it appears up to 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than average, making it a supermoon. This month’s full Moon on Monday 14 November is the closest Moon to Earth since 26 January 1948. The Moon won’t be this super again until 25 November 2034!
Astronomers may have solved the mystery of the peculiar volatile behaviour of a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy known as Markarian 1018 some 590 million light-years away. Combined data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other observatories suggest that the black hole is no longer being fed enough fuel to make its surroundings shine brightly.
Three teams of astronomers have made use of SPHERE, an advanced exoplanet-hunting instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, in order to shed light on the enigmatic evolution of fledgling planetary systems. The explosion in the number of known exoplanets in recent years has made the study of them one of the most dynamic fields in modern astronomy.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft watched clouds of methane moving across the far northern regions of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, on 29 and 30 October 2016. Several sets of clouds develop, move over the surface and fade during the course of a movie sequence spanning 11 hours, with one frame taken every 20 minutes. These clouds are measured to move at a speed of about 14 to 22 miles per hour.
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