News – Page 57 – Astronomy Now

Video: Queen guitarist Brian May discusses his song celebrating Ultima Thule flyby

1 January 2019 Astronomy Now

Queen guitarist and contributing New Horizons scientist Brian May wrote a song celebrating the spacecraft’s New Year’s flyby with Ultima Thule, a supposed block of ice and rock in the Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Video: New Horizons phone home will confirm health of spacecraft

1 January 2019 Astronomy Now

New Horizons Mission Operations Manager (MOM) Alice Bowman describes how New Horizons will turn to Earth and ‘phone home’ to confirm if the flyby of Ultima Thule was a success.

Supernovae not needed for at least some heavy isotopes

31 December 2018 Astronomy Now

New research suggesgs low-mass stars can cook up heavy elements, helping explain the observed abundance of some heavy isotopes.

Live coverage: New Horizons returns first close-up image

30 December 2018 Stephen Clark

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made a historic New Year’s encounter with an object nicknamed Ultima Thule in the Kuiper Belt a billion miles beyond Pluto. The probe passed around 3,500 kilometres from the mysterious object at 0533 GMT on New Year’s Day, making it the most distant Solar System body ever explored up close.

New Horizons closing in for historic flyby of Ultima Thule

29 December 2018 Astronomy Now

Covering 1.2 million kilometres per day, NASA’s New Horizons probe is on course for a high-speed New Year’s Day flyby of the Kuiper Belt body known as Ultima Thule.

Baby star throws a fit, erupts with titanic flare

28 December 2018 Astronomy Now

Astronomers have observed a titanic flare on a young star that was 10,000 times more powerful than any outburst ever recorded from Earth’s Sun, possibly influencing the eventual development of planets.

Saturn might lose its rings much sooner than expected

26 December 2018 Astronomy Now

The icy material making up Saturn’s rings is raining down into the planet’s atmosphere at rates implying the rings will disappear over the next 100 million to 300 million years.

Researchers find a “fossil” cloud made up of the original star stuff

25 December 2018 Astronomy Now

Astronomers have found only the third example of a fossil cloud made up of material generated in the Big Bang that’s not “polluted” by heavier elements cooked up in supernova blasts.

Ultima Thule poses an initial surprise for New Horizons team

23 December 2018 Astronomy Now

NASA’s New Horizons probe, racing toward a 1 January flyby of the Kuiper Belt body known as Ultima Thule, has given scientists their first major surprise: the oblong, or binary body shows no signs of a discernible light curve suggesting rotation.

Radar images reveal near-Earth asteroid on path by Earth

22 December 2018 Astronomy Now

Radar images reveal a 1.6-kilometre-long (1-mile-long) splinter-like asteroid tumbling as it races along a trajectory carrying it within 3 million kilometres (1.8 million miles) of Earth.