Space

Jeans Instability And A Spiral Bridge Between Two Ancient Galaxies

Sometimes we have to wonder in amazement about things found out in the universe. Case in point: a slinky string of pearls twisted into a corkscrew shape. Nothing special about that. Except this string is 100,000 light years long. The pearls in the string a ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 10 2014 - 11:46am

How To Accelerate Electrons The Van Allen Belt Way

What creates the two gigantic donuts of radiation surrounding Earth called the Van Allen radiation belts? The Van Allen Probes launched in 2012 want to find out. The inner Van Allen radiation belt is fairly stable, but the outer one changes shape, size an ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 16 2014 - 12:30am

Dance Of The Dwarfs

A new discovery that many small galaxies throughout the universe do not 'swarm' around larger ones like bees but instead 'dance' in orderly disc-shaped orbits is a challenge to our understanding of how the universe formed and evolved. ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 21 2014 - 1:31pm

Kepler-421b: Transiting Exoplanet With Longest Known Year

Kepler-421b has been revealed as a transiting exoplanet with the longest known year- 704 days. For comparison, Mars orbits our Sun once every 780 days.  The farther a planet is from its star, the less likely it is to transit the star from Earth's poi ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 22 2014 - 9:09am

J1023 And A 'Transformer' Pulsar

In June of 2013, an exceptional binary containing a rapidly spinning neutron star underwent a dramatic change in behavior never before observed- the pulsar radio beacon vanished and the system brightened fivefold in gamma rays, the most powerful form of l ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 30 2014 - 4:20pm

DXL Instrument Settles Interstellar Helium Debate

New findings have resolved a decades-old puzzle about a fog of low-energy X-rays observed over the entire sky. Thanks to refurbished detectors first flown on a NASA sounding rocket in the 1970s, astronomers have now confirmed the long-held suspicion that ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 29 2014 - 8:06pm

Wait, So How Much Does The Milky Way Weigh?

Does this galaxy make me look fat? Has Andromeda been taking skinny selfies? It turns out the way some astrophysicists have been studying our galaxy made it appear that the Milky Way might be more massive than it's neighbor Andromeda.  It isn't, ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 30 2014 - 12:19am

Four Novae: Fermi Space Telescope Reveals New Source Of Gamma Rays

Observations by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope of several stellar eruptions, called novae, firmly establish these relatively common outbursts almost always produce gamma rays, the most energetic form of light. "There's a saying that ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 1 2014 - 12:14am

IRC 0218 9.6 Billion Years Ago Is Farthest Lensing Galaxy Yet

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have unexpectedly discovered the most distant galaxy that acts as a cosmic magnifying glass. Seen here as it looked 9.6 billion years ago, this monster elliptical galaxy breaks the previous record-holde ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 1 2014 - 3:01am

New Evidence For Nanoflare Coronal Heating Theory- EUNIS

Scientists have recently gathered some of the strongest evidence to date to explain what makes the sun's outer atmosphere so much hotter than its surface. The new observations of the small-scale extremely hot temperatures are consistent with only one ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 2 2014 - 10:00am