News – Page 190 – Astronomy Now

Charting the Milky Way from the inside out

7 June 2015 Astronomy Now

The Sun’s location within the Milky Way’s dust-obscured disc is a complicating factor when trying to determine the Galaxy’s four-arm spiral structure, but researchers are obtaining a clearer picture by mapping embedded star clusters using data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).

Exiled stars explode far from home

5 June 2015 Astronomy Now

Hubble Space Telescope images confirm that three supernovae discovered several years ago exploded in the dark emptiness of intergalactic space — their nearest neighbours probably 300 light-years away — having been flung from their home galaxies millions or billions of years earlier.

Hubble observes chaotic dance of Pluto’s moons

4 June 2015 Astronomy Now

A comprehensive analysis of all available Hubble Space Telescope data shows that two of Pluto’s moons, Nix and Hydra, are wobbling unpredictably. Scientists believe the other two small moons, Kerberos and Styx, are likely in a similar situation, pending further study.

Construction to begin on world’s largest optical telescope

3 June 2015 Astronomy Now

Collaborators secure more than $500 million for the historic $1 billion project to build the Giant Magellan Telescope — a seven-mirror colossus gathering more than six times the amount of light of the current largest optical telescopes into images up to 10 times sharper than those of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Crashing comets may explain mysterious lunar swirls

3 June 2015 Astronomy Now

Lunar swirls have been the source of debate for years. The twisting, swirling streaks of bright soil stretch, in some cases, for thousands of miles across the Moon’s surface. Brown University researchers have produced new evidence that they were created by several comet collisions over the last 100 million years.

Young solar system discovered around a nearby star

2 June 2015 Astronomy Now

An international team using the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) at the Gemini South telescope in Chile has discovered a young, emerging planetary system around star HD 115600 that has remarkable similarities to our own Solar System in its infancy.

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.