News – Page 188 – Astronomy Now

Tour comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko in Rosetta’s latest image release

1 June 2015 Stephen Clark

The latest batch of images released from the European Space agency’s Rosetta mission shows the brutal gray landscape of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in vivid detail.

Habitable exomoons will need to be bigger than Mars

1 June 2015 Keith Cooper

Planet-sized moons orbiting huge gas giants could provide havens for life around other stars, but in order to be habitable these moons would need to be larger and more massive than Mars.

Sharp-eyed ALMA spots a flare on famous red giant star

30 May 2015 Astronomy Now

Observations with the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) have revealed what seems to be a gigantic flare on the surface of Mira, one of the closest and most famous red giant stars in the sky. Activity like this in red giants — similar to what we see in the Sun — comes as a surprise to astronomers.

Blue aurorae in Mars’ sky visible to the naked eye

30 May 2015 Astronomy Now

For the first time, an international team of scientists from NASA, the Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics of Grenoble (IPAG), the European Space Agency and Aalto University in Finland, have predicted that colourful, glowing aurorae can be seen by the naked eye on a terrestrial planet other than Earth — Mars.

Merging galaxies break radio silence

29 May 2015 Astronomy Now

A large Hubble survey confirms an unambiguous link between the presence of supermassive black holes that power high-speed, radio-signal-emitting jets and the merger history of their host galaxies. The results lend significant weight to the case for jets being the result of merging black holes.

NASA’s New Horizons sees more detail as it draws closer to Pluto

28 May 2015 Astronomy Now

What a difference 20 million miles makes! Images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons are growing in scale as the spacecraft approaches its mysterious target. The new images, taken May 8th-12th using a powerful telescopic camera and downlinked last week, reveal more detail about Pluto’s complex and high contrast surface.

Faint galaxies found hiding in the Virgo Cluster

27 May 2015 Astronomy Now

A recent survey using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope has discovered hundreds of new galaxies in the Virgo Cluster, the nearest large cluster of galaxies. Most are extremely faint dwarf galaxies, objects hundreds of thousands of times less massive than our Milky Way, and amongst the faintest galaxies known in the universe.

NASA's reworked image of Europa based on late 1990s data from the Galileo spacecraft.

Science instruments selected for NASA’s Europa mission

27 May 2015 Astronomy Now

NASA has selected nine science instruments for a future mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa in which a spacecraft would make multiple close flybys of the icy world — thought to contain a global subsurface ocean — to investigate whether the mysterious moon could harbour conditions suitable for life.

Dragonfly’s compound ‘eye’ reveals very faint galaxy structure

26 May 2015 Astronomy Now

At CASCA 2015, Roberto Abraham from the University of Toronto describes the first results from the Dragonfly Telephoto Array — an innovative, multi-lens system designed to produce digital images of ultra-low surface brightness objects at visible wavelengths — that is at least ten times more efficient than its nearest rival.

Hubble observes one-of-a-kind star nicknamed ‘Nasty 1’

24 May 2015 Astronomy Now

Astronomers were surprised to find a disc-like structure around a hefty, rapidly aging star nicknamed “Nasty 1,” which has never been seen before around a Wolf-Rayet star in our galaxy. The star may represent a brief transitory stage in the evolution of massive stars.