News – Page 194 – Astronomy Now

U. S. Naval Observatory releases 228 million-star catalogue

27 April 2015 Astronomy Now

The United States Naval Observatory’s Robotic Astrometric Telescope (URAT) near Flagstaff, Arizona began to systematically image the sky every clear night for a period of just over two years, culminating in the URAT1 catalogue of precise positional data on about 228 million stars.

Astronomers find runaway galaxies

25 April 2015 Astronomy Now

Researchers mining data from Virtual Observatory archives found 11 previously unknown compact elliptical galaxies that were isolated from from any galaxy cluster, flung out of their homes at speeds up to 6 million miles per hour to wander the void of intergalactic space.

Cosmic tsunami wakes up comatose galaxies

24 April 2015 Astronomy Now

An international team of astronomers have discovered sleeping galaxies that stopped forming stars in the distant past can be rejuvinated when clusters of galaxies merge, generating a cosmic shock wave that triggers the birth of a new generation of stars.

Space scientists pay homage to 25 years of the Hubble Space Telescope

23 April 2015 Astronomy Now

On April 24, 1990, the Space Shuttle Discovery achieved orbit with the Hubble Space Telescope in its payload bay. Since then, the HST has been serviced and upgraded five times, giving scientists the means to look farther out into the universe in greater detail and father back in time than ever before.

Binary black holes found verging on merging

22 April 2015 Keith Cooper

Twin black holes, so close that they are gravitationally bound and orbiting around one another in the final stages before they merge to form one colossal black hole, have been found in a quasar that existed around 10.3 billion years ago.

First visible light spectrum from exoplanet observed

22 April 2015 Kerry Hebden

The first ever direct detection of reflected light from an exoplanet, namely 51 Pegasi b, the first exoplanet ever discovered around a normal star, has been made by astronomers at the ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

Clusters of monster stars lit up the early universe

22 April 2015 Astronomy Now

The first stars were born at the end of the cosmological ‘dark ages’ several hundred million years after the Big Bang. Two Canadian researchers have calculated that clusters of these protostars may have been as luminous as 100 million Suns.

Planet-sized telescope gives a sharp view into black holes

21 April 2015 Astronomy Now

Astronomers building an Earth-sized virtual telescope capable of photographing the event horizon of the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way have extended their instrument to the South Pole.

A cold cosmic mystery solved

20 April 2015 Astronomy Now

Since its discovery over a decade ago on a map of the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang, astronomers have puzzled over the so-called Cold Spot — possibly the largest individual structure ever identified by humanity. Now, a team led by researchers from the University of Hawaii may have found an explanation for its existence.

White dwarf star may have shredded passing planet

19 April 2015 Astronomy Now

The destruction of a planet may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but a team of astronomers has found evidence that this may have happened in an ancient globular cluster of stars at the edge of the Milky Way galaxy.