News – Page 202 – Astronomy Now

31 August 2026

Rosetta begins listening for signs of life from comet lander

14 March 2015 Stephen Clark

Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft is trying to contact the Philae landing probe for the first time since the robot fell silent after a bouncy landing on a comet in November.

Hubble views of Ganymede’s aurorae suggest a vast salty subsurface ocean

13 March 2015 Astronomy Now

Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is the largest moon in our Solar System and the only moon with its own magnetic field. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has the best evidence yet for a 60-mile deep underground saline ocean on Ganymede, believed to contain more water than all the water on Earth’s surface.

Rippled Milky Way may be much larger than previously estimated

12 March 2015 Astronomy Now

New research indicates that the Milky Way may be 50 percent larger than previously believed. Furthermore, the Galaxy’s shape is not just a flattened spiral, but contoured into several concentric ripples.

Hydrothermal activity in subsurface ocean of Saturn’s moon Enceladus

12 March 2015 Astronomy Now

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft finds the first evidence of active hot-water chemistry beyond planet Earth on Saturn’s ocean moon Enceladus — results that have important implications for the habitability of icy worlds.

Pluto-bound probe tweaks its trajectory

12 March 2015 Stephen Clark

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft fine-tuned its path toward Pluto on Tuesday, firing its rocket thrusters for 93 seconds to aim for a fleeting flyby of the distant dwarf planet July 14.

Sun emits significant solar flare

12 March 2015 Astronomy Now

On March 11th at 4:22 pm GMT, the Sun emitted a powerful solar flare that registered 2.2 on the X-class scale. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the event in stunning detail.

Dwarf galaxy’s gamma-rays hint at dark matter

11 March 2015 Astronomy Now

An excess of gamma rays detected coming from a recently discovered dwarf galaxy named Reticulum 2, which is 98,000 light years from Earth, could provide researchers with clues about dark matter, which is the mysterious stuff that makes up most of the Universe.

New dwarf galaxies discovered in orbit around the Milky Way

11 March 2015 Astronomy Now

Astronomers have discovered a ‘treasure trove’ of rare dwarf satellite galaxies orbiting our own Milky Way. The closest is about 95,000 light-years away, while the most distant is more than a million light-years away.

Mysterious phenomena in a gigantic galaxy-cluster collision

10 March 2015 Astronomy Now

Researchers using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) have produced the most detailed image yet of an ongoing collision of galaxy clusters in a region called Abell 2256, revealing that unexpected processes are at work in such encounters.

Venus revealed in high-resolution radar images from Earth

10 March 2015 Astronomy Now

By combining the powerful radar transmitter of the Arecibo Observatory and the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) — the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope — astronomers were able to penetrate the visually opaque atmospheric veil of Venus to make remarkably detailed images of the surface of the planet without leaving Earth.