News – Page 162 – Astronomy Now

Mysterious star remains silent on the SETI front

9 December 2015 Keith Cooper

A mysterious star that erratically dims by nearly a quarter as a swarm of unknown objects passes in front of it – leading to speculations that artificial objects could be orbiting the star – continues to refuse to give up its secrets after a search for laser pulses from the system turned up empty.

Colliding neutron stars seeded solar nebula with heavy elements

9 December 2015 Keith Cooper

Heavy elements present at the dawn of the Solar System were produced by a nearby merger of two neutron stars, which unleashed a powerful gamma-ray burst, according to astronomers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

VLT studies mysterious dwarf galaxy born in cosmic collision

9 December 2015 Astronomy Now

The spectacular aftermath of a 360 million year old cosmic collision is revealed in great detail in new images from ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Among the debris is a rare and mysterious young dwarf galaxy. This galaxy is providing astronomers with an excellent opportunity to learn more about similar galaxies that are expected to be common in the early universe, but are normally too faint and distant to be observed by current telescopes.

Astronomer solves mystery of ‘born again’ stars with Hubble

7 December 2015 Astronomy Now

University of Texas astronomer Natalie Gosnell has used the Hubble Space Telescope to better understand why some stars aren’t evolving as predicted. These so-called “blue stragglers” look hotter and bluer than they should for their advanced age. It’s almost as it they were somehow reinvigorated to look much younger than they really are.

Japanese probe fires rockets to steer into orbit at Venus

7 December 2015 Stephen Clark

Five years after missing a shot to enter orbit at Venus, Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft completed a critical rocket burn early Monday in a bid to salvage the research mission and become the only space probe operating around Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor.

ALMA spots monstrous baby galaxies cradled in dark matter

6 December 2015 Astronomy Now

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) have discovered a nest of colossal baby galaxies 11.5 billion light-years away. The young galaxies seem to reside at the junction of gigantic filaments in a web of dark matter. These findings are important for understanding how enormous galaxies like these are formed and how they evolve into huge elliptical galaxies.

Magnified image of the faintest galaxy from the early universe

5 December 2015 Astronomy Now

Astronomers harnessing the combined power of NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have found the faintest object ever seen in the early universe. It existed about 400 million years after the big bang, 13.8 billion years ago. The new object is comparable in size to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a diminutive satellite galaxy of our Milky Way.

See the highest-resolution snapshots from July’s Pluto flyby

4 December 2015 Stephen Clark

Scientists are marveling at some of the best views of Pluto recorded by the New Horizons spacecraft during its July 14 flyby of the unexplored icy dwarf in a set of photos released Friday showing Pluto’s icy, rugged topography in eye-popping detail.

‘Fast Radio Burst’ sheds new light on origin of these extreme events

3 December 2015 Astronomy Now

Fast radio bursts (FRBs), brief yet brilliant eruptions of cosmic radio waves, have baffled astronomers since they were first reported nearly a decade ago. Though they appear to come from the distant universe, none of these enigmatic events has revealed more than the slimmest details about how and where it formed, until now.

European probe blasts off on gravitational wave demonstration

3 December 2015 Stephen Clark

A solid-fueled Vega launcher fired through a low cloud deck and sped into orbit from the South American jungle early Thursday with a pioneering European spacecraft that marks a key step in a century-long quest to detect elusive gravitational waves predicted to permeate the cosmos.