Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) — flashes of high-energy light occurring about once a day, randomly, from around the sky — are the brightest events in the known universe. While a burst is underway, it is many millions of times brighter than an entire galaxy. Astronomers are anxious to decipher their nature as their tremendous brightness opens windows into the young universe.
The alignment of Sun, Moon and Earth resulted in a partial solar eclipse on 13 September, visible only from the southern tip of Africa and Antarctica. But as NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, kept up its constant watch on the Sun, its view of the eclipse was photobombed by the Earth — the first time that an Earth eclipse and a lunar transit have coincided.
An international team of astronomers have successfully peered through the ‘amniotic sac’ of an embryonic star to observe the innermost region of a burgeoning solar system for the first time. The magnitude +6.8 star, which is called HD 100546 or KR Muscae, lies 325 light-years away in the far southern constellation Musca.
Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active world in the solar system, with hundreds of volcanoes, some erupting lava fountains up to 250 miles high. New NASA research suggests that tides flowing in a subsurface ocean of molten rock, or magma, could explain why Io’s volcanoes appear in the “wrong” place compared to models that predict how the moon’s interior is heated.
Gigantic groundwater outbursts created the largest flood channels in the solar system on Mars, 3.2 billion years ago. For many years it was thought that this was caused by the release of water from a global water table, but research just published reveals regional deposits of sediment and ice emplaced 450 million years earlier to be the source.
Scientists at MIT and elsewhere have identified regions on the far side of the Moon, called the lunar highlands, that may have been so heavily pelted by small asteroids during a period called the Late Heavy Bombardment 4 billion years ago that the impacts completely shattered the upper crust, leaving these regions essentially as fractured and porous as they could be.
An international team of astronomers has discovered a prodigious galaxy cluster with a core bursting with new stars — an incredibly rare find. This surprising new discovery, the result of collaborative synergy from ground- and space-based observations, is the first to show that gigantic galaxies at the centres of massive clusters can grow significantly by feeding off gas stolen from other galaxies.
New close-up images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveal a bewildering variety of surface features that have scientists reeling because of their range and complexity. Images downlinked in the past few days reveal new features as diverse as possible dunes, nitrogen ice flows oozing out of mountainous regions onto plains, and even networks of valleys possibly carved by material flowing over Pluto’s surface.
Nearby dwarf galaxy Wolf—Lundmark—Melotte (WLM) poses an intriguing mystery: How is it able to form brilliant star clusters without the dusty, gas-rich environments found in larger galaxies? The answer, astronomers believe, lies in densely packed and previously unrecognised nuggets of star-forming material sprinkled throughout the galaxy.
The brightest spots on the dwarf planet Ceres gleam with mystery in new views delivered by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. These closest-yet views of 57-mile-wide impact crater Occator, with a resolution of 450 feet (140 metres) per pixel, give scientists a deeper perspective on these very unusual features — though the precise nature of the spots remains unknown.
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