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Astronomy News and Research - December 2009 Archives
 | An instrument package developed in part by the University of Colorado at Boulder for the $2.2 billion orbiting Herschel Space Observatory launched in May by the European Space Agency has provided one of the most detailed views yet of space up to 12 billion years back in time. ...> Full Article |
 | The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist. In the Dec. 24th issue of Nature, a team of scientists reveal how NASA's Voyager spacecraft have solved the mystery. ...> Full Article |
 | NASA's Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere satellite has captured five complete polar seasons of noctilucent or "night-shining" clouds with an unprecedented horizontal resolution of 3 miles by 3 miles. Results show that the cloud season turns on and off like a "geophysical light bulb" and they reveal evidence that high altitude mesospheric "weather" may follow similar patterns as our ever-changing weather near the Earth's surface. ...> Full Article |
 | For almost 50 years, astronomers have puzzled over the youthful appearance of stars known as blue stragglers. ...> Full Article |
 | Two brown dwarf-sized objects orbiting a giant old star show that planets may assemble around stars more quickly and efficiently than anyone thought possible, according to an international team of astronomers. ...> Full Article |
 | Saturn's largest moon, Titan, looks to be the only place in the solar system -- aside from our home planet, Earth -- with copious quantities of liquid (largely, liquid methane and ethane) sitting on its surface. According to planetary astronomer Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Earth and Titan share yet another feature, which is inextricably linked with that surface liquid: common fog. ...> Full Article |
 | A network of cameras deployed around the Arctic in support of NASA's THEMIS mission has made a startling discovery about the Northern Lights. Sometimes, vast curtains of aurora borealis collide, producing spectacular outbursts of light. ...> Full Article |
 | Astronomers announced today that they have discovered a "super-Earth" orbiting a red dwarf star 40 light-years from Earth. They found the distant planet with a small fleet of ground-based telescopes no larger than those many amateur astronomers have in their backyards. Although the super-Earth is too hot to sustain life, the discovery shows that current, ground-based technologies are capable of finding almost-Earth-sized planets in warm, life-friendly orbits. ...> Full Article |
 | Astronomers have discovered the second super-Earth exoplanet for which they have determined the mass and radius, giving vital clues about its structure. It is also the first super-Earth where an atmosphere has been found. The exoplanet, orbiting a small star only 40 light-years away from us, opens up dramatic new perspectives in the quest for habitable worlds. The planet, GJ1214b, has a mass about six times that of Earth and its interior is likely to be mostly made of water ice. ...> Full Article |
 | A new study of images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory on supernova remnants -- the debris from exploded stars -- shows that the symmetry of the remnants, or lack thereof, reveals how the star exploded. This is an important discovery because it shows that the remnants retain information about how the star exploded even though hundreds or thousands of years have passed. ...> Full Article |
NASA's current mission in orbit around the moon, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, has been providing crucial insights about our nearest celestial neighbor since its launch in June. At a scientific meeting today, researchers unveiled the latest findings from three instruments of the powerful suite of seven aboard the satellite. LRO is expected to return more data about the moon than all previous orbital missions combined.
...> Full Article
 | A new telescope -- VISTA (the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) -- has just started work at ESO's Paranal Observatory and has made its first release of pictures. VISTA is a survey telescope working at infrared wavelengths and is the world's largest telescope dedicated to mapping the sky. Spectacular new images of the Flame Nebula, the center of our Milky Way galaxy and the Fornax Galaxy Cluster show that it is working extremely well. ...> Full Article |
 | Herschel has peered inside an unseen stellar nursery and revealed surprising amounts of activity. Some 700 newly-forming stars are estimated to be crowded into filaments of dust stretching through the image. The image is the first new release of "OSHI," ESA's Online Showcase of Herschel Images. ...> Full Article |
Physicists propose there may be a new stage for some dying stars. Dubbed electroweak stars, they are fueled by the conversion of quarks to leptons, which prevents or staves off collapse into a black hole.
...> Full Article
 | About 550 light-years from Earth, a star like our Sun is writhing in its death throes. Chi Cygni has swollen in size to become a red giant star so large that it would swallow every planet out to Mars in our solar system. Moreover, it has begun to pulse dramatically in and out, beating like a giant heart. New close-up photos of the surface of this distant star show its throbbing motions in unprecedented detail. ...> Full Article |
Vanderbilt University Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Kelly Holley-Bockelmann has been awarded the National Science Foundation's largest ever Faculty Early Career Development grant. She will use the prestigious award to continue her studies of black holes while supporting the university's innovative program designed to make the university the top producer of underrepresented minorities with Ph.D. in physics and astronomy.
...> Full Article
Titan's ice is stronger than most bedrock found on earth, yet it is more brittle, causing it to erode more easily, according to new research by San Francisco State University Assistant Professor Leonard Sklar. Today, at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting, Sklar and his team presented new measurements from tests on ice as cold as minus 170 degrees Celcius which demonstrate that ice gets stronger as temperature decreases.
...> Full Article
 | "Earth system science is a relatively young science," said Marc Imhoff, project scientist for the mission and a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Terra's sensors have provided the first coordinated set of observations allowing us to link Earth system processes across space and time so we can better understand how they function together and how we interact with them." ...> Full Article |
 | In the new blockbuster Avatar, humans visit the habitable -- and inhabited -- alien moon called Pandora. Life-bearing moons like Pandora or the Star Wars forest moon of Endor are a staple of science fiction. With NASA's Kepler mission showing the potential to detect Earth-sized objects, habitable moons may soon become science fact. ...> Full Article |
 | An international team of scientists has observed four super-massive black holes at the center of galaxies, which may provide new information on how these central black hole systems operate. Their findings are published in December's first issue of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. ...> Full Article |
 | An international team of planet hunters has discovered as many as six low-mass planets around two nearby Sun-like stars, including two "super-Earths" with masses 5 and 7.5 times the mass of Earth. ...> Full Article |
A specialized camera on a telescope operated by UK astronomers from Liverpool has made the first measurement of magnetic fields in the afterglow of a gamma-ray burst. The result is reported in the December 10 issue of Nature magazine by the team of Liverpool John Moores University astronomers who built and operate the telescope and its unique scientific camera, named RINGO.
...> Full Article
 | New observations of Alcor, one of the stars that makes the constellation known as the Big Dipper's, have uncovered a smaller companion star named Alcor B. Project 1640 was able to show that the two stars moved together using "common parallactic motion." ...> Full Article |
 | A galaxy located billions of light-years away is commanding the attention of NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and astronomers around the globe. Thanks to a series of flares that began Sept. 15, the galaxy is now the brightest source in the gamma-ray sky -- more than 10 times brighter than it was in the summer. ...> Full Article |
 | Studies of one of the galaxy's most active black-hole binaries reveal a dramatic change that will help scientists better understand how these systems expel fast-moving particle jets. ...> Full Article |
 | The new Wide Field Camera 3 aboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken the deepest image yet of the Universe in near-infrared light. The faintest and reddest objects in the image are likely the oldest galaxies ever identified, having formed between only 600-900 million years after the Big Bang. ...> Full Article |
Rochester Institute of Technology astronomer Dan Dicken is trying to determine the origin of infrared emission from powerful distant active galactic nuclei. Dicken will follow the blueprint made by signatures of starbursts to differentiate starbursts from supermassive black holes associated with active galactic nuclei.
...> Full Article
 | Extensive analyses and modeling of Cassini imaging and heat-mapping data have confirmed and extended previous ideas that migrating ice, triggered by infalling reddish dust that darkens and warms the surface, may explain the mysterious two-toned "yin-yang" appearance of Saturn's moon Iapetus. The results, published online Dec. 10 in a pair of papers in the journal Science, provide what may be the most plausible explanation to date for the moon's bizarre appearance, which has puzzled astronomers for more than 300 years. ...> Full Article |
 | A superbright supernova found in a dwarf galaxy by a robotic search is the first confirmed example of a pair-instability supernova, the result of the partial core collapse and thermonuclear detonation of an enormously massive star, like the earliest stars in the Universe. ...> Full Article |
What happens when a really gargantuan star - one hundreds of times bigger than our sun -- blows up? Although a theory developed years ago describes what the explosion of such an enormous star should look like, no one had actually observed one -- until now.
...> Full Article
 | Challenges associated with long-duration spaceflight do not end with landing. Astronauts often suffer from balance problems that lead to dizziness and difficulty standing, walking and turning corners when they return to normal gravity. Researchers are developing techniques, using a treadmill and simulated balance disturbances, to help astronauts adapt to a new gravity environment. The techniques could also have benefits for Earth-bound populations such as the elderly. ...> Full Article |
 | Scientists have ruled out the possibility that methane is delivered to Mars by meteorites, raising fresh hopes that the gas might be generated by life on the red planet, in research published tomorrow in Earth and Planetary Science Letters. ...> Full Article |
 | An unmanned NASA satellite will survey the whole sky to discover millions of stars and galaxies, about 100,000 asteroids, planetary "construction zones" and nearby cool stars. NASA'S Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer is scheduled to launch on Dec. 9 to map the sky at four infrared wavelengths. WISE will catalogue hundreds of millions of objects. ...> Full Article |
 | An extensive study made with ESO's Very Large Telescope deepens a long-standing mystery in the study of stars similar to the Sun. Unusual year-long variations in the brightness of about one third of all Sun-like stars during the latter stages of their lives still remain unexplained. Over the past few decades, astronomers have offered many possible explanations, but the new, painstaking observations contradict them all and only deepen the mystery. The search for a suitable interpretation is on. ...> Full Article |
 | Max Planck astronomers have succeeded in directly imaging a faint object that orbits a sun-like star. ...> Full Article |
 | Nearly 100 years after the discovery of cosmic rays, a new type of gamma ray telescope is finally allowing physicists to make images of sites of cosmic ray acceleration. ...> Full Article |
 | The young star cluster Trumpler 14 is revealed in another stunning ESO image. The amount of exquisite detail seen in this portrait, which beautifully reveals the life of a large family of stars, is due to the multi-conjugate adaptive optics demonstrator on ESO's Very Large Telescope. Never before has such a large patch of sky been imaged using adaptive optics, a technique by which astronomers are able to remove most of the atmosphere's blurring effects. ...> Full Article |
 | Every cook knows the ingredients for making bread: flour, water, yeast and time. But what chemical elements are in the recipe of our universe?
Most of the ingredients are hydrogen and helium. These cosmic lightweights fill the first two spots on the famous periodic table of the elements. ...> Full Article |
 | NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has made the first unambiguous detection of high-energy gamma-rays from an enigmatic binary system known as Cygnus X-3. The system pairs a hot, massive star with a compact object -- either a neutron star or a black hole -- that blasts twin radio-emitting jets of matter into space at more than half the speed of light. ...> Full Article |
The latest data delivered back to Earth by the Herschel Space Observatory -- launched in May by the European Space Agency -- have opened a new window on galaxies for researchers at McMaster University.
...> Full Article
 | A recent NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of part of NGC 7023, or the Iris Nebula, highlights a perfect dust laboratory in the sky. ...> Full Article |
 | Researchers at Caltech suggest that the eccentricity of Saturn's orbit around the sun may be responsible for the unusually uneven distribution of methane and ethane lakes over the northern and southern polar regions of the planet's largest moon, Titan. On Earth, similar "astronomical forcing" of climate drives ice-age cycles. ...> Full Article |
 | Which come first, the supermassive black holes that frantically devour matter or the enormous galaxies where they reside? A brand new scenario has emerged from a recent set of outstanding observations of a black hole without a home: black holes may be "building" their own host galaxy. This could be the long-sought missing link to understanding why the masses of black holes are larger in galaxies that contain more stars. ...> Full Article |
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