News – Page 105 – Astronomy Now

Tracing the cosmic web with star-forming galaxies in the distant Universe

3 February 2017 Stephen Clark

A research group led by Hiroshima University has revealed a picture of the increasing fraction of massive star-forming galaxies in the distant universe.

Juno dives over Jupiter’s cloud tops with main engine still offline

2 February 2017 Stephen Clark

NASA’s Juno spacecraft made a high-speed pass less than 3,000 miles over Jupiter’s turbulent clouds Thursday, taking dozens of pictures, measuring radiation and plasma waves, and peering deep inside the planet’s atmosphere, but officials still have not cleared the orbiter’s main engine for a planned maneuver to position the probe for improved science observations.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe moonlights as asteroid sleuth

1 February 2017 Stephen Clark

On course to collect specimens from asteroid Bennu after its launch last year, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will search this month for objects sharing an orbit with Earth, a bonus science opportunity to locate possible fragments of the primordial building blocks that formed our home planet.

NASA’s Fermi discovers the most extreme blazars yet

31 January 2017 Stephen Clark

NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has identified the farthest gamma-ray blazars, a type of galaxy whose intense emissions are powered by supersized black holes. Light from the most distant object began its journey to us when the universe was 1.4 billion years old, or nearly 10 percent of its present age.

Cassini offers best-ever view of Saturn’s rings

30 January 2017 Stephen Clark

A sequence of images captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft last month are the most detailed pictures ever taken of Saturn’s famous rings, revealing complex, unexplained bands and the movements of dozens of tiny icy moonlets spinning around the planet.

Cosmic lenses support finding on faster than expected expansion of the Universe

30 January 2017 Stephen Clark

By using galaxies as giant gravitational lenses, an international group of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have made an independent measurement of how fast the Universe is expanding. The newly measured expansion rate for the local Universe is consistent with earlier findings. These are, however, in intriguing disagreement with measurements of the early Universe.

NASA resumes JWST vibration testing

25 January 2017 Stephen Clark

Vibration testing on the James Webb Space Telescope, the multibillion-dollar successor to Hubble, has resumed after engineers traced a problem that cropped up last month to a restraint holding part of the observatory’s giant segmented mirror in place for launch.

China sets November launch for lunar sample return mission

25 January 2017 Stephen Clark

China plans to launch a robotic mission to return samples from the lunar surface, the first such mission in four decades, in November on top of the country’s new heavy-lift Long March 5 rocket, according to state media reports.

NuSTAR finds new clues to ‘chameleon supernova’

25 January 2017 Stephen Clark

“We’re made of star stuff,” astronomer Carl Sagan famously said. Nuclear reactions that happened in ancient stars generated much of the material that makes up our bodies, our planet and our solar system. When stars explode in violent deaths called supernovae, those newly formed elements escape and spread out in the universe.

Our galaxy’s black hole is spewing out planet-size ‘spitballs’

23 January 2017 Stephen Clark

Every few thousand years, an unlucky star wanders too close to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The black hole’s powerful gravity rips the star apart, sending a long streamer of gas whipping outward. That would seem to be the end of the story, but it’s not. New research shows that not only can the gas gather itself into planet-size objects, but those objects then are flung throughout the galaxy in a game of cosmic “spitball.”