News – Page 2 – Astronomy Now

Cassini downlinks view of Titan’s methane clouds on third loop inside rings

10 May 2017 Stephen Clark

The Cassini spacecraft captured captivating images of wispy methane clouds suspended above Titan’s hydrocarbon lakes as the probe headed for its third shot through Saturn’s ring gap Tuesday.

Surprise! When a brown dwarf is actually a planetary mass object

9 May 2017 Astronomy Now

Sometimes a brown dwarf is actually a planet — or planet-like anyway. A team of scientists in the United States and Canada have discovered that what astronomers had previously thought was one of the closest brown dwarfs to our own Sun is in fact a planetary mass object.

James Webb Space Telescope shipped to Texas for its biggest test yet

9 May 2017 Stephen Clark

The centerpiece of the James Webb Space Telescope has arrived at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for a three-month test to ensure the observatory’s sensors and gold-coated mirrors work in the frigid temperatures of deep space.

SOFIA confirms nearby planetary system is similar to our own

8 May 2017 Astronomy Now

NASA’s flying observatory, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, recently completed a detailed study of a nearby planetary system. The investigations confirmed that this nearby planetary system has an architecture remarkably similar to that of our solar system.

NASA probe finds Saturn ring gap emptier than predicted

3 May 2017 Stephen Clark

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft sped through a gap between Saturn and its rings for the second time Tuesday after data from the probe’s first perilous passage through the unexplored region last week found it to contain fewer potentially hazardous dust particles than expected.

Is dark matter “fuzzy”?

2 May 2017 Astronomy Now

Astronomers have used data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to study the properties of dark matter, the mysterious, invisible substance that makes up a majority of matter in the universe. The study, which involves 13 galaxy clusters, explores the possibility that dark matter may be more “fuzzy” than “cold,” perhaps even adding to the complexity surrounding this cosmic conundrum.

U.S. instrument team to fly camera on South Korean Moon mission

28 April 2017 Stephen Clark

A camera developed by scientists at Arizona State University will join four foreign-built instruments on South Korea’s first lunar orbiter set for launch at the end of 2018, NASA announced Friday.

Ripples in cosmic web measured using rare double quasars

28 April 2017 Astronomy Now

Astronomers believe that matter in intergalactic space is distributed in a vast network of interconnected filamentary structures known as the cosmic web. Nearly all the atoms in the universe reside in this web, vestigial material left over from the Big Bang.

New survey hints at ancient origin for Cold Spot

27 April 2017 Astronomy Now

A supervoid is unlikely to explain a ‘Cold Spot’ in the cosmic microwave background, according to the results of a new survey, leaving room for exotic explanations like a collision between universes.

Cassini contacts Earth after flying inside Saturn’s rings

27 April 2017 Stephen Clark

Ground controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed Thursday the Cassini spacecraft survived its first trip between Saturn and its rings, the closest any probe has ever come to the planet.