News – Page 195 – Astronomy Now

Hubble finds phantom objects near dead quasars

4 April 2015 Astronomy Now

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has imaged a set of enigmatic quasar ghosts — ethereal, looped structures glowing green that orbit their host galaxies marking the graves of quasars that flickered to life and then faded. They offer new insights into the turbulent pasts of these galaxies.

BBC Stargazing Live helped amateur astronomers find supernovae

3 April 2015 Astronomy Now

More than 40,000 amateur astronomers working on a supernova hunt run by the Zooniverse team based at the University of Oxford, in collaboration with BBC Stargazing Live, found five supernovae and catalogued two million unidentified heavenly bodies found by the SkyMapper telescope in Australia.

Boldly go explore an asteroid with NASA’s Vesta Trek

2 April 2015 Astronomy Now

Data gathered from multiple instruments aboard NASA’s Dawn spacecraft have been compiled into Vesta Trek — a free, web-based application that provides detailed visualisations of one of the largest asteroids in our Solar System.

Curiosity rover eyes prominent mineral veins on Mars

2 April 2015 Astronomy Now

Two-tone mineral veins at a site NASA’s Curiosity rover has reached by climbing a layered Martian mountain offer clues about multiple episodes of fluid movement. These episodes occurred later than the wet environmental conditions that formed lake-bed deposits the rover examined at the mountain’s base.

Space observatories find missing clue to galaxy cluster formation

2 April 2015 Astronomy Now

Astronomers using the Herschel Space Observatory and Plank satellite, plus University of Arizona observatories, discover likely precursors of the galaxy clusters we see today and reveal glimpses into how galaxies like our Milky Way came to be.

Curiosity’s Martian nitrogen find raises possibility of ancient life

31 March 2015 Kerry Hebden

Nitrogen, in the form of nitric oxide (one nitrogen atom and one oxygen atom), has been detected for the first time on the surface of Mars by a team of researchers using the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite aboard NASA’s Curiosity rover, adding to the growing speculation that life could have once flourished on ancient Mars.

Race to detect gravitational waves intensifies

31 March 2015 Astronomy Now

One of the great challenges in astrophysics is the detection of low-frequency gravitational waves — elusive ripples in the fabric of space-time caused by extremely energetic and large-scale cosmic events. To this end, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves $14.5 million over 5 years.

Planet Mercury blackened by billions of years of comet dust

30 March 2015 Astronomy Now

Mercury’s dark, barely reflective surface has long been a mystery to scientists. Now, researchers believe that a steady rain of carbon over billions of years from comets crumbling near the Sun has coated the innermost planet.

Dark matter even darker than once thought

28 March 2015 Astronomy Now

Astronomers using observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have studied how dark matter in clusters of galaxies behaves when the clusters collide. The results show that dark matter interacts with itself even less than previously thought, and narrows down the options for what this mysterious substance might be.

Astronomers upgrade their cosmic light bulbs for studying the fabric of space

27 March 2015 Astronomy Now

Researchers identify the best Type Ia supernovae for gauging cosmic distances, potentially improving these measurements with a precision of more than two times that achieved before, up to six billion light-years away. These findings will help light the way to understanding dark energy.