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Mars rover steers toward active sand dunes

22 November 2015 Stephen Clark

The Curiosity rover’s next destination is a moving mound of wind-blown dark sand blanketing the base of Mount Sharp, the focal point of the Mars mission’s research, scientists said.

“Planetary Nebulae” receive more meaningful physical presence

22 November 2015 Astronomy Now

Despite their name, planetary nebulae have nothing to do with planets. They were described as such by early astronomers whose telescopes showed them as glowing disc-like objects, but we now know that they represent the final stage of activity of stars like our Sun. A way of estimating more accurate distances to planetary nebulae dispersed across our Galaxy has just been announced.

Hubble survey reveals early galaxies were more efficient at making stars

21 November 2015 Astronomy Now

A study just published by University of Texas at Austin assistant professor Steven Finkelstein and colleagues reveals that galaxies were more efficient at making stars when the universe was younger. The announcement explains the team’s discovery that there are a lot more bright, highly star-forming galaxies in the early universe than scientists previously thought.

A day on Pluto, a day on Charon

20 November 2015 Astronomy Now

Pluto’s day is 6.4 Earth days long. The dwarf planet’s largest moon, Charon, also rotates once every 6.4 days as the two worlds are tidally locked to each another. This sequence of images from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and the Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft shows us full rotations of the two bodies.

The little star with a mighty magnetic punch

20 November 2015 Keith Cooper

A dim red dwarf star with just one-tenth the mass of the Sun has been shown to possess a magnetic field so strong that its average strength rivals that of the most extreme active regions on our Sun.

Stanford astronomers observe the birth of an alien planet

19 November 2015 Astronomy Now

Stanford University researchers announce evidence of an exoplanet being born that could move us one step closer to understanding the process of planet formation around other stars. The alien planet, called LkCa 15 b, orbits a star 450 light-years away and appears to be on its way to growing into a world similar to Jupiter.

A supermassive black hole in action

19 November 2015 Astronomy Now

Scientists often use the combined power of multiple telescopes to reveal the secrets of the universe — and this image of elliptical galaxy Hercules A is a prime example of when this technique is strikingly effective. Radio observations with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array were combined with the Hubble visible-light data obtained with the Wide Field Camera 3 to create this striking composite image.

Dark matter dominates in nearby dwarf galaxy

18 November 2015 Astronomy Now

Dark matter is called “dark” for a good reason. Although they outnumber particles of regular matter by more than a factor of 10, particles of dark matter are elusive. Now, by measuring the mass of a nearby dwarf galaxy called Triangulum II, astronomers believe they may have found the highest concentration of dark matter in any known galaxy.

‘Superflares’ scorch potentially-habitable exoplanet

18 November 2015 Keith Cooper

One of the best candidates for a potentially habitable exoplanet is likely an airless, irradiated wasteland that has been scorched by flares from its star, according to new research based on studies performed by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope.

The birth of monsters: VISTA pinpoints earliest giant galaxies

18 November 2015 Astronomy Now

ESO’s VISTA survey telescope has spied a horde of previously hidden massive galaxies that existed when the universe was in its infancy. By discovering and studying more of these galaxies than ever before, astronomers have, for the first time, found out exactly when such monster galaxies first appeared.