News – Page 107 – Astronomy Now

NASA’s NEOWISE mission spies one comet, maybe two

30 December 2016 Stephen Clark

NASA’s NEOWISE mission has recently discovered some celestial objects traveling through our neighborhood, including one on the blurry line between asteroid and comet. Another — definitely a comet — might be seen with binoculars through next week.

Internal debris may be causing problem with Mars rover’s drill

29 December 2016 Stephen Clark

Engineers believe a piece of foreign object debris may be intermittently stalling a motor needed to place the Curiosity Mars rover’s drill bit onto rocks, and the robot’s ground team is assessing the source of the potential contamination.

Astronomers team up to give first look at birthplaces of most current stars

27 December 2016 Stephen Clark

Astronomers have gotten their first look at exactly where most of today’s stars were born. To do so, they used telescope arrays in New Mexico and Chile to look at distant galaxies seen as they were some 10 billion years ago.

Piers Sellers, shuttle astronaut and renowned climate researcher, dies at 61

26 December 2016 Stephen Clark

Former astronaut Piers Sellers, a British-born climate scientist who flew on three space shuttle missions to help construct the International Space Station, has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 61.

Hunt for water at Ceres goes underground

23 December 2016 Stephen Clark

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has continued its survey of the dwarf planet Ceres this year, discovering rock-bound ice hidden just beneath the airless world’s rugged surface and a handful of icy outcrops inside craters in the northern hemisphere, raising hopes that Ceres could have once held a buried habitable ocean of liquid water.

Festive nebulae light up Milky Way Galaxy satellite

23 December 2016 Stephen Clark

The sheer observing power of the Hubble Space Telescope is rarely better illustrated than in an image such as this. This glowing pink nebula, named NGC 248, is located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, just under 200,000 light-years away and yet can still be seen in great detail.

Engineers examine unexpected readings from JWST shake test

20 December 2016 Stephen Clark

NASA says engineers are diagnosing the source of “anomalous readings” during a recent vibration test of the sensitive optics and sensors at the heart of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

Mars rover’s drill out of action

18 December 2016 Stephen Clark

The rock-coring drill fixed to the end of the Curiosity rover’s robot arm has suspended operations to allow engineers on the ground to diagnose, and officials hope correct, a problem traced to the mechanism that pushes the drill bit onto rocks to collect powder samples.

Microlensing study suggests most common outer planets likely Neptune-mass

16 December 2016 Astronomy Now

A new statistical study of planets found by a technique called gravitational microlensing suggests that Neptune-mass worlds are likely the most common type of planet to form in the icy outer realms of planetary systems.

Spinning black hole swallowing star explains superluminous event

13 December 2016 Astronomy Now

An extraordinarily brilliant point of light seen in a distant galaxy, and dubbed ASASSN-15lh, was thought to be the brightest supernova ever seen. But new observations from several observatories, including ESO and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, have now cast doubt on this classification.