Space

Astronomers Plan Second Look At Constellation Carina

Astronomers from the University of Florida will take a second look this summer at a rare cosmic cradle for the universe's largest stars, the constellation Carina. The massive gas cloud is located 8,000 light years away in the Southern sky and is home ...

Article - News Staff - May 10 2010 - 6:00pm

Herschel Finds Hole In NGC 1999

ESA's Herschel infrared space telescope has located a hole in the side of a cloud of bright reflective gas known to astronomers as NGC 1999. The hole has provided scientists with a surprising glimpse into the end of the star-forming process. Stars are ...

Article - News Staff - May 11 2010 - 11:44am

Chandra Observatory Locates Missing Matter In WHIM

New images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton, have helped astronomers detect a vast reservoir of intergalactic gas about 400 million light years from Earth. This discovery is the strongest evidence yet that the “missing m ...

Article - News Staff - May 11 2010 - 11:49am

CLG J02182-05102- Galaxy Cluster's Modern Appearance Surprises Experts

A Texas A&M University-led team of astronomers has uncovered what may be the earliest, most distant cluster of galaxies ever detected. The group of roughly 60 galaxies, called CLG J02182-05102, is nearly 10 billion years old — born just 4 billion years ...

Article - News Staff - May 11 2010 - 12:30pm

Who are your heroes?

Given I'm a mad scientist building a satellite in my basement, who are my heroes?  Are they Carl Sagan, astronomer populist extraordinaire?  Neil Tyson, a dynamic yet media-saavy heir to Sagan?  Newton, inventor of the apple? If I had to pick 3, I ...

Blog Post - Project Calliope - May 11 2010 - 7:46pm

Researchers Model Supernova In 3D

Researches at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics have carried out the first fully three-dimensional computer simulations of a core collapse supernova over a timescale of hours after the initiation of the blast. The model will explain how initial asy ...

Article - News Staff - May 12 2010 - 11:47am

Where Are All The Aliens?

Richard Dawkins suggested that the first measure of an intelligent species, should two chance to meet, would be whether they understood how they came to be. I imagine such a remarkable exchange of cosmic existentialism set on a hovering space dongle, lit o ...

Article - Dan Gillick - May 13 2010 - 1:19pm

SN 2005E: A New Class Of Supernovae?

In the last yen years, astronomers have discovered scads of strange exploding stars, one-offs that may point to new and unusual physics. Supernova (SN) 2005E, discovered five years ago by the University of California, Berkeley's Katzman Automatic Imag ...

Article - News Staff - May 19 2010 - 1:42pm

Sun-like Star Devours Planet WASP-12b

WASP-12b is the hottest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy, and it may also be the shortest-lived. The planet is being eaten by its parent star, according to observations made by a new instrument on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the Cosmic Origins ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 8 2010 - 2:11pm

Ancient Galaxies Reveal Secrets Of Star Formation

Using a super-sensitive camera/spectrometer on the Herschel Space Observatory, astronomers have mapped the skies as they appeared 10 billion years ago, giving them a better look at the bright galaxies in the distant universe that appear to be forming stars ...

Article - News Staff - May 21 2010 - 10:46am