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Citizen scientists make good black-hole hunters

Trained volunteers are as good as professional astronomers at finding jets shooting from massive black holes and matching them to their host galaxies, research suggests. Scientists working on citizen science project Radio Galaxy Zoo developed an online tutorial to teach volunteers how to spot black holes and other objects that emit energy through radio waves.

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Bring on the night, say National Park visitors in new study

Natural wonders like tumbling waterfalls, jutting rock faces and banks of wildflowers have long drawn visitors to national parks and inspired efforts to protect their beauty. According to an American study published 4 September in Park Science, visitors also value and seek to protect a different kind of threatened natural resource in the parks: dark nighttime skies.

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One of Saturn’s rings is not like the others

NASA’s Cassini mission scientists were watching closely when the Sun set on Saturn’s rings in August 2009. It was the equinox — one of two times in the Saturnian year when the Sun illuminates the planet’s enormous ring system edge-on — providing an extraordinary opportunity for the spacecraft to observe short-lived changes that reveal details about the nature of the rings.

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Hubble’s Andromeda Galaxy survey unlocks clues to star birth

In a Hubble Space Telescope survey of 2,753 young, blue star clusters in the neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy (M31), astronomers have found that M31 and our own galaxy have a similar percentage of newborn stars based on mass. The intensive survey was a unique collaboration between astronomers and “citizen scientists,” volunteers who provided invaluable help in analysing the mountain of data from Hubble.

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Using stellar ‘twins’ to climb the cosmic distance ladder

Astronomers have developed a new, highly accurate method of measuring the distances between stars using a technique which searches out stellar ‘twins’. The method could be a valuable complement to the Gaia satellite which is creating a 3-D map of the sky over five years, measuring the size of the Milky Way and enabling a greater understanding of how it evolved.

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Searching for the most habitable galaxies

A team of UK scientists is attempting to build the first cosmobiological model to explore the habitability of the universe. Using a survey of more than 140,000 galaxies nearest to Earth, the team found that elliptical galaxies — rather than spirals like our Milky Way — could be the most probable “cradles of life”.

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What happened to early Mars’ atmosphere?

Scientists may be closer to solving the mystery of how Mars changed from a world with surface water billions of years ago to the arid Red Planet of today. A new analysis of the largest known deposit of carbonate minerals on Mars suggests that the original Martian atmosphere may have already lost most of its carbon dioxide by the era of valley network formation.

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Comet Hitchhiker would take tour of small solar-system bodies

A concept called Comet Hitchhiker, developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, puts forth a new way to get into orbit and land on comets and asteroids, using the kinetic energy — the energy of motion — of these small bodies. Masahiro Ono, the principal investigator based at JPL, had Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” in mind when dreaming up the idea.

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World’s most powerful telescope digital camera gets green light for construction

The U.S. Department of Energy has approved the start of construction for a 3.2-gigapixel digital camera — the world’s largest — at the heart of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). Assembled at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the camera will be the eye of LSST, revealing unprecedented details of the universe and helping unravel some of its greatest mysteries.