X-Highlight – Page 31 – Astronomy Now

Massive European spacecraft launched toward Mars

14 March 2016 Stephen Clark

Boosted off planet Earth by a Russian Proton rocket, a European-built space probe departed for Mars on Monday, beginning a mission to test future landing technologies and search for methane, a potential signature of microbial life.

Cassini sees tilted terminator of Saturn’s moon Enceladus

14 March 2016 Astronomy Now

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured this view of Saturn’s moon Enceladus that shows wrinkled plains that are remarkably youthful in appearance, being generally free of large impact craters.

Telescopes combine to push frontier on galaxy clusters

12 March 2016 Astronomy Now

Galaxy clusters are enormous collections of hundreds or even thousands of galaxies and vast reservoirs of hot gas embedded in massive clouds of dark matter. To learn more about clusters, including how they grow via collisions, astronomers have used some of the world’s most powerful X-ray, optical and radio telescopes. The name for this galaxy cluster project is the “Frontier Fields”.

InSight Mars probe escapes cancellation, reset for 2018

10 March 2016 Stephen Clark

The InSight Mars lander has won a reprieve from NASA’s top managers after persistent problems with one of the probe’s science instruments caused the mission to miss a narrow launch window planned for this month.

The Saturnian sisters

10 March 2016 Astronomy Now

Similar in many ways, Saturn’s moons Tethys and Rhea (left and right, respectively) even share a discoverer: Giovanni Cassini, namesake of the NASA spacecraft that captured this view. Although somewhat different in size, Rhea (949 miles across) and Tethys (660 miles) are both composed largely of ices and are generally thought to be geologically inactive today.

Hubble reveals chemical fingerprint of emission-line star

29 February 2016 Astronomy Now

Showcased at the centre of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is an emission-line star known as IRAS 12196-6300 that lies some 2,300 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Crux. Under 10 million years old and not yet burning hydrogen at its core — unlike the Sun — this star is still in its infancy.

Unravelling the Milky Way’s Central Molecular Zone

29 February 2016 Astronomy Now

Surrounding the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy and stretching out to about 700 light-years, is a dense zone of activity called the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ). It contains many dense molecular clouds that would normally be expected to produce new stars, but which are instead eerily desolate. Where did the CMZ come from? No place else in the Milky Way is remotely like it.

NASA’s IBEX observations pin down interstellar magnetic field

28 February 2016 Astronomy Now

Immediately after its 2008 launch, NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, spotted a curiosity in a thin slice of space: More particles streamed in through a long, skinny swath in the sky than anywhere else. The origin of the so-called IBEX ribbon was unknown — but its very existence opened doors to observing what lies outside our solar system.

Researchers home in on likely whereabouts of Planet Nine

27 February 2016 Astronomy Now

Using observations from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, a team of French astronomers from the Institut de mécanique céleste et de calcul des éphémérides, and the laboratory GeoAzur have been able to specify the possible positions of a ninth planet in the Solar System.

Supermassive black holes banish matter into cosmic voids

26 February 2016 Astronomy Now

On the largest scales, galaxies and everything they contain are concentrated into filaments that stretch around the edge of enormous voids. Data from the Illustris project, a large computer simulation of the evolution and formation of galaxies, suggests that the black holes at the centre of every galaxy are helping to send matter into the loneliest places in the universe.