Astronomy News
Courtesy of Astronomy
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Astrophysics News
Courtesy of Science Daily
A new infrared image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, shows a cosmic rosebud blossoming with new stars. The stars, called the Berkeley 59 cluster, are the blue dots to the right of the image center. They are ripening out of the dust cloud from which they formed, and at just a few million years old, are young on stellar time scales.
Astronomers have come across what appear to be two of the earliest and most primitive supermassive black holes known. The discovery, based largely on observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, will provide a better understanding of the roots of our universe, and how the very first black holes, galaxies and stars all came to be.
Astronomers have discovered a new planet the size of Jupiter. The planet is mostly made of hydrogen and helium, but may contain up to 20 Earth masses of heavier elements including rock and water under high pressure. It thus appears to be very similar to the solar system's giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn.
Giant filaments of cold dust stretching through the Milky Way are revealed in a new image from the European Space Agency's Planck satellite. Analyzing these structures could help to determine the forces that shape our galaxy and trigger star formation.
Desktop experiments could point the way to dark matter discovery, complementing grand astronomical searches and deep underground observations. According to recent theoretical results, small blocks of matter on a tabletop could reveal elusive properties of the as-yet-unidentified dark matter particles that make up a quarter of the universe.
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Solar System News
Courtesy of Science Daily
The general public can now follow along with NASA on its journey of lunar discovery. On March 15, the publicly accessible Planetary Data System released data sets from the seven instruments on board NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
From our vantage point on Earth, Saturn may look like a peaceful orb with rings worthy of a carefully raked Zen garden, but NASA's Cassini spacecraft has been shadowing the gas giant long enough to see that the rings are a rough and tumble roller derby. It has also revealed that the planet itself roils with strange weather and shifting patterns of charged particles.
A Canadian researcher has helped solve a 37-year-old space mystery using lunar images released by NASA and maps from an atlas of the moon.
Images from the recent flyby of Phobos, on March 7, 2010, have been released. The images show Mars' rocky moon in exquisite detail, with a resolution of just 4.4 m per pixel. They show the proposed landing sites for the forthcoming Phobos-Grunt mission.
Space physicists have identified the impact of the Sun on Mars' atmosphere. The scientists report that Mars is constantly losing part of its atmosphere to space. The new study shows that pressure from solar wind pulses is a significant contributor to Mars's atmospheric escape.
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The general public can now follow along with NASA on its journey of lunar discovery. On March 15, the publicly accessible Planetary Data System released data sets from the seven instruments on board NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
A new infrared image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, shows a cosmic rosebud blossoming with new stars. The stars, called the Berkeley 59 cluster, are the blue dots to the right of the image center. They are ripening out of the dust cloud from which they formed, and at just a few million years old, are young on stellar time scales.
From our vantage point on Earth, Saturn may look like a peaceful orb with rings worthy of a carefully raked Zen garden, but NASA's Cassini spacecraft has been shadowing the gas giant long enough to see that the rings are a rough and tumble roller derby. It has also revealed that the planet itself roils with strange weather and shifting patterns of charged particles.
Astronomers have come across what appear to be two of the earliest and most primitive supermassive black holes known. The discovery, based largely on observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, will provide a better understanding of the roots of our universe, and how the very first black holes, galaxies and stars all came to be.
Astronomers have discovered a new planet the size of Jupiter. The planet is mostly made of hydrogen and helium, but may contain up to 20 Earth masses of heavier elements including rock and water under high pressure. It thus appears to be very similar to the solar system's giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn.
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