Keith Cooper – Page 6 – Astronomy Now

Could globular clusters be home to intelligent life?

6 January 2016 Keith Cooper

Globular clusters may be the perfect location to find extraterrestrial civilisations, according to new research announced at the 227th American Astronomical Society meeting in Florida.

No. 1 New Horizons at Pluto

3 January 2016 Keith Cooper

The long-awaited fly-by of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft, on 14 July 2015, was an event 85 years in the making, following Pluto’s discovery by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. Since then, Pluto has gone from planet to dwarf planet, but despite protestations from the New Horizons team, its reclassification never really changed the mission or the importance of what it would find at Pluto.

No. 2 Water on Mars

3 January 2016 Keith Cooper

Liquid water existing on the surface of Mars, in the here and now, has been the holy grail of Martian exploration for some time, but in October 2015 NASA announced that the orbiting Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) had turned water-diviner to find compelling evidence that water is bursting out onto the red surface and trickling down the slopes of crater walls and hillsides.

No. 3 Dark matter is ‘sticky’

3 January 2016 Keith Cooper

For years, dark matter seemed to do nothing. It had mass and therefore could influence space gravitationally, but there was no evidence of it interacting with anything else in the Universe in any other way, which made it incredibly frustrating to study. Then, in 2015, a breakthrough occurred.

No. 4 A planet like Earth?

2 January 2016 Keith Cooper

There was great media excitement in July when it was announced that the Kepler Space Telescope had discovered the most Earth-like planet yet, but appearances can be deceiving.

No. 5 The great galaxy shutdown

2 January 2016 Keith Cooper

Stars are not forming in the same great numbers that they did billions of years ago and several advances in 2015 have shed light on why this downturn took place.

No. 6 Our first up close look at Ceres

2 January 2016 Keith Cooper

In spring 2015 NASA’s Dawn mission, coming off the back of exploring the asteroid Vesta, entered into orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres and immediately found a puzzle for the space probe to unpick.

No. 7 Is that you, Beagle 2?

2 January 2016 Keith Cooper

At a packed press conference at London’s Royal Society back in January 2015, British scientists revealed what we had waited nearly a dozen years for: that the Beagle 2 space probe, lost back in December 2003 when it attempted to land on Mars, had been found.

No. 8 The most luminous galaxy in the Universe

2 January 2016 Keith Cooper

A distant galaxy that outshines our own by a thousand times set a new record when it was spotted in 2015 by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite.

No. 9 Rosetta rides with its comet

1 January 2016 Keith Cooper

While 2014 was the year the Rosetta spacecraft celebrated making it into orbit around a comet, 2015 was the year it got down to some serious hard work. Its comet, with the tongue-twisting name 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, made its closest approach (186 million kilometres) to the Sun, a period known as perihelion when the comet would be expected to be at its most active. Rosetta was there to witness this.