News – Astronomy Now

19 April 2018

Powerful new camera developed to directly image exoplanets

16 April 2018 Astronomy Now

Physicists are testing a powerful new camera known as DARKNESS that is designed to directly image exoplanets orbiting nearby stars. The camera is being tested with the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Mount Palomar.

Juno peers beneath Jupiter’s cloud tops, revealing unexpected wonders

11 April 2018 William Harwood

Using infrared data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft, scientists have assembled a 3D map of Jupiter’s north polar region, showing details of a huge central cyclone and eight surrounding storms. Juno also is shedding light on Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field.

Globular clusters may host multiple generations of black hole mergers

10 April 2018 Astronomy Now

Dense star clusters may serve as breeding grounds for successive generations of black hole mergers, resulting in gargantuan holes, generating gravitational waves that researchers hope to detect.

Super-cooled SQUIDs may help detect elusive dark matter

10 April 2018 Astronomy Now

Super-cooled quantum detectors have demonstrated the sensitivity needed to detect telltale microwave photons from dark matter axions, if they exist, kicking off the latest high-tech hunt for the elusive particles.

Astronomers locate isolated neutron star beyond our galaxy

9 April 2018 Astronomy Now

New images from ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and other telescopes reveal a rich landscape of stars and glowing clouds of gas in one of our closest neighbouring galaxies, the Small Magellanic Cloud. The pictures have allowed astronomers to identify an elusive stellar corpse buried among filaments of gas left behind by a 2000-year-old supernova explosion.

Saturn’s clouds run deep, rings may rain organics

6 April 2018 Stephen Clark

Saturn’s clouds have roots deeper inside the planet’s atmosphere than scientists previously thought, and Saturn’s rings — now believed to have formed in the last 200 million years — appear to be raining organic molecules down on the planet, according to observations made by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft last year in the final weeks of its mission.

Hubble uncovers the farthest star ever seen

5 April 2018 Astronomy Now

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope were able to pinpoint a faraway star more than halfway across the Universe and set a new distance record.

Rare metals on Mars and Earth implicate colossal impacts

4 April 2018 Astronomy Now

New research has revealed that a giant impact on Mars more than four billion years ago would explain the unusual amount of “iron loving” elements in the Red Planet.

Comet provides rare chance to study Solar System’s origins

4 April 2018 Astronomy Now

More samples of comets are urgently required to better understand the early history of the Solar System, say researchers analyzing comet dust brought back to Earth by NASA’s Stardust mission in 2006.

Webb telescope’s launch delayed until 2020

28 March 2018 Stephen Clark

Blaming a slew of technical snags and “avoidable errors,” NASA officials said Tuesday that the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, already years behind schedule, will be delayed to 2020, potentially pushing the mission’s development cost above an $8 billion cap mandated by Congress.