Space

How Did The Milky Way Survive? Dark Matter Did It, Says Hypothesis

Why did our Milky Way galaxy survive while others failed?    Ill-defined, convenient catch-all dark matter gets the credit, according to a new paper.   Dark matter is thought to make up 85 per cent of the Universe’s mass and it may also be one of the build ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 30 2009 - 8:42pm

Discovery: New Black Hole HLX-1 Has 500 Solar Masses And 260 Million Times Our Sun's Brightness

Astronomers using ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory have discovered a black hole they labeled HLX-1 (Hyper-Luminous X-ray source 1), which lies towards the outskirts of the galaxy ESO 243-49, approximately 290 million light-years from Earth and weighs mor ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 1 2009 - 5:19pm

First Moon Images From Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has transmitted its first images since reaching the moon on June 23. The spacecraft's two cameras, collectively known as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC, were activated June 30. The cameras are ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 2 2009 - 2:23pm

Hitchhiker's Guide To The Milky Way Gets A Cold Dust Map

Astronomers have unveiled a new atlas of the inner regions of the Milky Way- that's our home galaxy, if you're from someplace else- and it's peppered with thousands of previously undiscovered dense knots of cold cosmic dust, the potential bi ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 3 2009 - 11:18am

Vela Pulsar And Dozens Of Others Get Probed

Two studies published in Science Express show the analysis of gamma-rays from two dozen pulsars, including 16 discovered by  NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Fermi is the first spacecraft able to identify pulsars by their gamma-ray emissions al ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 6 2009 - 11:31am

Messier 87- The Virgo Cluster's Galactic Particle Accelerator

Even among giants Messier 87, with two to three billion times the mass of our sun, stands out, completely dominating the Virgo cluster. A supermassive black hole exists in the center of Messier 87 and gigantic plasma flows shoot out from the vicinity of th ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 6 2009 - 1:52pm

Swan Nebula In Sagittarius- Our Favorite Stellar Nursery

The Swan Nebula, also called the Omega Nebula because when seen through a small telescope the nebula has a shape that reminds some observers of the final letter of the Greek alphabet, omega, while others see a swan with its distinctive long, curved neck, i ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 8 2009 - 12:59pm

Milky Way Mystery Means Dark Matter? Meh

A team of astrophysicists say they have solved a mystery that led some scientists to speculate that the distribution of certain gamma rays in our Milky Way galaxy was evidence for undetectable 'dark matter' making up much of the mass of the unive ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 9 2009 - 10:33am

Did Galileo Discover Neptune 234 Years Before Anyone Else?

Johann Galle fans won't like reading this but professor David Jamieson, Head of the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne, says Galileo beat him to the punch in the discovery of Neptune- by 234 years. If correct, the discovery would be the ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 9 2009 - 10:43am

Population III Stars And The Early Universe Get A New Hypothesis

Stars and galaxies formed back in the early days of the universe,  some 13 billion years ago, were not nearly as massive as originally thought. Population III stars were not only smaller than believed, they actually formed in binary systems, that is, pairs ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 11 2009 - 10:35am