News – Page 136 – Astronomy Now

Departure of Europe’s first Mars rover delayed to 2020

4 May 2016 Stephen Clark

Europe’s ExoMars rover will not be ready for launch in 2018, officials said Monday, forcing a two-year delay for the ambitious mission to drill into the Martian surface and search for the remnants of past life.

Evidence builds for ancient under-ice volcanoes on Mars

4 May 2016 Astronomy Now

Volcanoes erupted beneath an ice sheet on Mars billions of years ago, far from any ice sheet on the Red Planet today, new evidence from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter suggests. The research about these volcanoes helps show there was extensive ice on ancient Mars. Such an environment combining heat and moisture could have provided favourable conditions for microbial life.

Planet Nine: a world that shouldn’t exist

3 May 2016 Astronomy Now

Earlier this year scientists presented evidence for Planet Nine, a Neptune-mass planet in an elliptical orbit 10 times farther from our Sun than Pluto. New research examining theories how this planet could end up in such a distant orbit finds that most scenarios have low probabilities. Therefore, the presence of Planet Nine remains a bit of a mystery.

Three potentially habitable worlds found orbiting nearby ultra-cool dwarf star

2 May 2016 Astronomy Now

Astronomers have discovered three planets orbiting an ultra-cool dwarf star just 40 light-years from Earth. These worlds have sizes and temperatures similar to those of Venus and Earth and are the best targets found so far for the search for life outside the solar system. They are the first planets ever discovered around such a tiny and dim star.

Japan gives up on rescuing black hole observatory

2 May 2016 Stephen Clark

Japan’s space agency says it has ceased efforts to rescue a failed X-ray astronomy satellite after it spun out of control and broke apart in orbit, declaring the nearly $400 million mission lost two months after its launch.

Rare transit of Mercury to take place on 9 May

1 May 2016 Astronomy Now

On Monday, 9 May there will be a rare transit of Mercury, when the innermost planet in our solar system will pass directly between the Earth and the Sun. The last time this happened was in 2006. With a properly filtered telescope and fine weather, the entire 7½-hour event can be seen from the British Isles.

A piece of the early solar system returns after billions of years in cold storage

29 April 2016 Astronomy Now

Astronomers have found a unique object that appears to be made of material from the time of Earth’s formation, which has been preserved in the Oort Cloud for billions of years. C/2014 S3 (PANSTARRS) is the first object to be discovered on a long-period cometary orbit that has the characteristics of a pristine inner solar system asteroid.

Winds a quarter the speed of light seen leaving mysterious X-ray binary systems

29 April 2016 Astronomy Now

Two black holes in nearby galaxies have been observed in X-rays by ESA’s XMM-Newton space observatory devouring their companion stars at a rate exceeding classically understood limits, and in the process, kicking out matter into surrounding space at astonishing speeds of around a quarter the speed of light.

Quadruple laser system heralds sharper images for ESO’s Very Large Telescope

27 April 2016 Astronomy Now

ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile hosted an event to mark the first light for the four powerful lasers that form a crucial part of the adaptive optics systems on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Attendees were treated to a spectacular display of the most powerful laser guide stars ever used for astronomy against the majestic southern sky.

NASA balloon mission seeks evidence of cosmological inflation

27 April 2016 Astronomy Now

Now that scientists have confirmed the existence of gravitational waves, a NASA team using a balloon-borne observatory is set to search for a predicted signature of primordial gravitational waves that would prove the infant universe expanded far faster than the speed of light and began growing exponentially almost instantaneously after the Big Bang.