Astronomers have developed a new, highly accurate method of measuring the distances between stars using a technique which searches out stellar ‘twins’. The method could be a valuable complement to the Gaia satellite which is creating a 3-D map of the sky over five years, measuring the size of the Milky Way and enabling a greater understanding of how it evolved.
A team of UK scientists is attempting to build the first cosmobiological model to explore the habitability of the universe. Using a survey of more than 140,000 galaxies nearest to Earth, the team found that elliptical galaxies — rather than spirals like our Milky Way — could be the most probable “cradles of life”.
Scientists may be closer to solving the mystery of how Mars changed from a world with surface water billions of years ago to the arid Red Planet of today. A new analysis of the largest known deposit of carbonate minerals on Mars suggests that the original Martian atmosphere may have already lost most of its carbon dioxide by the era of valley network formation.
Dominating this image is the so-called Prawn Nebula, part of the gigantic nebula Gum 56, some 6,000 light-years away in Scorpius. For millions of years stars have been born out of the nebula’s gas, material which is later returned to the stellar nursery when the aging stars either expel their material gently into space, or eject it more dramatically in supernova explosions.
Nomination number 11 from the prestigious Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition, an annual celebration of the most beautiful and spectacular visions of the cosmos by astrophotographers worldwide. The 2015 competition received 2700 spectacular entries from over 60 countries and the winners will be announced 17 September.
A concept called Comet Hitchhiker, developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, puts forth a new way to get into orbit and land on comets and asteroids, using the kinetic energy — the energy of motion — of these small bodies. Masahiro Ono, the principal investigator based at JPL, had Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” in mind when dreaming up the idea.
This new Hubble image shows Messier 96 (M96 or NGC 3368), a spiral galaxy in the constellation Leo that lies about 35 million light-years away. About the same mass and size as the Milky Way, M96 resembles a giant maelstrom of glowing gas, rippled with dark dust along asymmetric arms that swirl inwards towards the nucleus.
The U.S. Department of Energy has approved the start of construction for a 3.2-gigapixel digital camera — the world’s largest — at the heart of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). Assembled at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the camera will be the eye of LSST, revealing unprecedented details of the universe and helping unravel some of its greatest mysteries.
The Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah, USA is visited by more than 400,000 people each year. The International Dark-Sky Association has now granted Gold-Tier International Dark Sky Park status to Canyonlands, an honour reserved for the darkest of dark skies and the most stunning of starscapes.
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