Space

CTA 1- 10,000 Year-Old Stellar Corpse Points To Evolution Of Pulsars

About three times a second, a 10,000-year-old stellar corpse sweeps a beam of gamma-rays toward Earth. This object, known as a pulsar, is the first one known to "blink" only in gamma rays, and was discovered by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) onbo ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 19 2008 - 12:43am

Astronomy Discoveries Sometimes Mean Looking In The Right Place At The Right Time

A bit of serendipity has given astronomers a surprise view of a never-before-observed event in the birth of a galaxy. University of Florida and University of California-Santa Cruz astronomers are the first to discover the onset of a huge flow of gas from a ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 21 2008 - 6:25pm

Gum 29- Amazing Intricacies Of A Vast Stellar Nursery

A new image released by ESO shows the amazing intricacies of a vast stellar nursery, which goes by the name of Gum 29. In the center, a small cluster of stars — called Westerlund 2 — has been found to be the he home of one of the most massive double star s ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 22 2008 - 1:12am

Existence Of Electric Activity On Saturn's Titan Moon Confirmed

Physicists of the University of Granada and the University of Valencia (Spain) have developed a proceeding to analyse specific data sent by the Huygens probe from Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, proving “in an unequivocal way” that there is natural elec ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 25 2008 - 2:08am

Arp 147 Shows Hubble Is Back In Business

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is back in business with a snapshot of the fascinating galaxy pair Arp 147. The science operations were resumed on 25 October 2008, four weeks after a problem with the science data formatter took the spacecraft into safe ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 30 2008 - 1:18pm

Hubble Space Telescope Resurrected Despite Servicing Mission Delay

Just last month, Hubble Space Telescope's main instruments were idled by a computer failure, but not to worry, thanks to NASA engineers, who successfully transferred the work of the failed science data downlink computer to a backup system, Hubble is u ...

Article - Jen Palmares Meadows - Nov 4 2008 - 11:32am

NGC 404- 'Ghost Of Mirach' Materializes

NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer has lifted the veil off a ghost known to haunt the local universe, providing new insight into the formation and evolution of galaxies.  The eerie creature, called NGC 404, is a type of galaxy known as "lenticular. ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 5 2008 - 10:55pm

Universal Census Gets A 27 Million Pixel Galaxy Boost

Anyone who has wondered what it might be like to dive into a pool of millions of distant galaxies of different shapes and colours, will enjoy the latest image released by ESO. Obtained in part with the Very Large Telescope, the image is the deepest ground- ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 7 2008 - 12:39pm

Zooming Into Solar System Formation

Planet formation, as we all know (and don't know), is chaotic. It is like a lorenz Attractor constructable in computational astrophysics labs. When I was working on my astronomy project at Harvard this summer, I realized that there was a way to zoom i ...

Blog Post - Usman Anwer - Nov 9 2008 - 11:43am

RCW120- A Glowing Stellar Nursery Near Constellation Scorpius

Illustrating the power of submillimetre-wavelength astronomy, an APEX image reveals how an expanding bubble of ionised gas about ten light-years across is causing the surrounding material to collapse into dense clumps that are the birthplaces of new stars. ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 11 2008 - 11:27am