NAOC – Astronomy Now

China’s Yutu rover dies on the Moon

5 August 2016 Stephen Clark

A Chinese rover sent to the Moon in 2013 has stopped operating, officials announced this week, ending a groundbreaking 31-month mission that made discoveries in lunar geology and catapulted China’s space programme to new heights.

Australian technology behind the world’s largest radio telescope

5 May 2016 Astronomy Now

Technology developed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) will sit at the heart of one of the world’s biggest ever science projects, the Five hundred metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), following an agreement with the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC).

Globular clusters make new stars by ‘adopting’ stray cosmic gases

27 January 2016 Astronomy Now

An international research team of astronomers has, for the first time, found young populations of stars within globular clusters that have apparently developed courtesy of star-forming gas flowing in from outside of the clusters themselves. This method stands in contrast to the conventional idea of the clusters’ initial stars shedding gas as they age in order to spark future rounds of star birth.