William Harwood – Astronomy Now

Now you see it, now you don’t; before and after a global dust storm

20 July 2018 William Harwood

Images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provide dramatic before-and-after shots of Mars showing the impact of a global dust storm that has obscured the surface.

The Hubble Space Telescope’s jaw-dropping Messier catalogue

28 June 2018 William Harwood

Amateur astronomers the world over routinely use the Messier catalog as a guide to deep space targets visible in relatively small telescopes. The Hubble Space Telescope provides an altogether different experience.

The Hubble Space Telescope and globular clusters – a match made in heaven

26 June 2018 William Harwood

The Hubble Space Telescope routinely snaps breath-taking views of densely packed globular clusters, but astronomers don’t yet understand the role these vast assemblies might have played in the Milky Way’s evolution.

X-rays, at least, no problem for planets orbiting Alpha Centauri AB

7 June 2018 William Harwood

More than a decade of observations shows any planets orbiting the two main stars in the nearby Alpha Centauri system are not being blasted by dangerous levels of radiation that would be hostile to life.

Evidence found for ‘giant comet’ theory of Pluto’s origin

26 May 2018 William Harwood

Data collected by NASA’s New Horizons probe and ESA’s Rosetta mission suggest Pluto might have formed from the accretion of a billion or so smaller bodies similar to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and other Kuiper Belt objects.

Computer simulations suggest reason for strange moon shapes

22 May 2018 William Harwood

Computer simulations show how some of Saturn’s small inner moons might have acquired their unique pasta-like shapes thanks to low-velocity near head-on impacts of smaller bodies in the presence of extremely strong tidal forces.

A planet, its rings and three moons – a postcard from Cassini

8 May 2018 William Harwood

A postcard from Cassini – a stunning edge-on view of Saturn, its rings, their shadow and three moons, captured by the orbiter in 2006 as it passed within about 2.7 million kilometres (1.7 million miles) of the sixth planet.

Gaia takes a fingerprint of the Large Magellanic Cloud

3 May 2018 William Harwood

The European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft collected proper motion data for several million stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way, allowing astronomers to visualize its rotation in a unique fingerprint-like pattern.

Hubble spots surviving companion to a supernova

26 April 2018 William Harwood

For the first time, the Hubble Space Telescope has photographed the surviving companion of a star that exploded in a supernova blast 17 years ago, evidence that supernovas can originate in binary star systems.

Large galaxies may host multiple supermassive black holes

24 April 2018 William Harwood

Many, if not all, large galaxies host supermassive black holes, including the Milky Way. A new study predicts such galaxies likely host more than one, far from the galactic core, the result of earlier mergers.