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Astronomy News and Research - January 2008 Archives
 | physicists discover powerful radio waves that may lead to spacecraft damage ...> Full Article |
 | Mars has an ethereal, tenuous atmosphere with less than one-percent the surface pressure of Earth, which challenges scientists to explain complex, wind-sculpted landforms seen with unprecedented detail in images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. ...> Full Article |
 | A strange and violent fate awaits a white dwarf star that wanders too close to a moderately massive black hole. According to a new study, the black hole's gravitational pull on the white dwarf would cause tidal forces sufficient to disrupt the stellar remnant and reignite nuclear burning in it, giving rise to a supernova explosion with an unusual appearance. Observations of such supernovae could confirm the existence of intermediate-mass black holes, currently the subject of much debate among astronomers. ...> Full Article |
 | Contrary to expectations for a small icy body, much of the comet dust returned by the Stardust mission formed very close to the young sun and was altered from the solar system's early materials. ...> Full Article |
First results from a new NASA-funded scientific instrument at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii are helping scientists overturn long-standing assumptions about powerful explosions called novae and have produced the first unified model for a nearby nova called RS Ophiuchi.
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A young star is speeding away from the Milky Way so fast that astronomers have been puzzled by where it came from; based on its young age it has traveled too far to have come from our galaxy. Now by analyzing its velocity, light intensity, and for the first time its tell-tale elemental composition, Carnegie astronomers Alceste Bonanos and Mercedes López-Morales, and collaborators Ian Hunter and Robert Ryans from Queen's University Belfast have determined that it came from our neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The result suggests that it was ejected from that galaxy by a yet-to-be-observed massive black hole. The research will be published in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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 | ESA's orbiting gamma-ray observatory, Integral, has made the first unambiguous discovery of highly energetic X-rays coming from a galaxy cluster. The find has shown the cluster to be a giant particle accelerator. ...> Full Article |
 | The Arecibo Observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico will observe a newly discovered asteroid on Jan. 27-28, as the object called 2007 TU24 passes within 1.4 lunar distances, or 334,000 miles, from Earth. ...> Full Article |
 | An image based on data taken with ESO's Very Large Telescope reveals a triplet of galaxies intertwined in a cosmic dance. ...> Full Article |
 | The storms may tell why gas giant planets are so windy ...> Full Article |
 | Scientists are monitoring the orbit of asteroid 2007 TU24. The asteroid, believed to be between 150 meters (500 feet) and 610 meters (2,000 feet) in size, is expected to fly past Earth on Jan. 29, with its closest distance being about 537,500 kilometers (334,000 miles) at 12:33 a.m. Pacific time (3:33 a.m. Eastern time). It should be observable that night by amateur astronomers with modest-sized telescopes. ...> Full Article |
 | Astonomers determine order of planets past, present, and possibly future. ...> Full Article |
 | One week ago, the MESSENGER spacecraft transmitted to Earth the first high-resolution image of Mercury by a spacecraft in over 30 years, since the three Mercury flybys of Mariner 10 in 1974 and 1975. MESSENGER's Wide Angle Camera (WAC), part of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS), is equipped with 11 narrow-band color filters, in contrast to the two visible-light filters and one ultraviolet filter that were on Mariner 10's vidicon camera. ...> Full Article |
 | The Ulysses spacecraft today is making a rare flyby of the sun's north pole. Unlike any other spacecraft, Ulysses is able to sample winds at the sun's poles, which are difficult to study from Earth. ...> Full Article |
 | A team of physicists and astronomers from the University of Sussex and Imperial College London have uncovered hints that there may be cosmic strings - lines of pure mass-energy - stretching across the entire Universe. ...> Full Article |
 | The European Space Agency (ESA) signalled the start of a busy period for the planet Mercury, when it signed the contract for industrial development to start for the BepiColombo mission today (18th January 2008) at Astrium in Friedrichshafen, Germany. UK scientists and industry have key roles in BepiColombo, including construction of spacecraft subsystems and science instrument design. ...> Full Article |
 | On 12 January, China scientific expedition to the Antarctica succeeded for the second time in climbing up to Dome A, the highest Antarctic icecap peak. A similar feat was made by Chinese scientists about three years ago in January 2005, leaving first human footprints there. However, this time is different, because it is the maiden trip for Chinese astronomers, Prof. ZHOU Xu with the National Astronomic Observatories at CAS (NAOC) and Prof. ZHU Zhengxi from the CAS Purple Mountain Observatory (PMO), marking a new milestone for the cosmic exploration based on the apex of the Antarctic icecap. ...> Full Article |
 | NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected plump black holes where least expected -- skinny galaxies. Like people, galaxies come in different shapes and sizes. There are thin spirals both with and without central bulges of stars, and more rotund ellipticals that are themselves like giant bulges. Scientists have long held that all galaxies except the slender, bulgeless spirals harbor supermassive black holes at their cores. Furthermore, bulges were thought to be required for black holes to grow. ...> Full Article |
 | When Mariner 10 flew past Mercury three times in 1974 and 1975, the same hemisphere was in sunlight during each encounter. As a consequence, Mariner 10 was able to image less than half the planet. Planetary scientists have wondered for more than 30 years about what spacecraft images might reveal about the hemisphere of Mercury that Mariner 10 never viewed. ...> Full Article |
 | Until now, Mars has generally been regarded as a desert world, where a visiting astronaut would be surprised to see clouds scudding across the orange sky. However, new results show that the arid planet possesses high-level clouds that are sufficiently dense to cast a shadow on the surface. ...> Full Article |
 | Astronomers have produced a scientific gold mine of detailed, high-quality images of nearby galaxies that is yielding important new insights into many aspects of galaxies, including their complex structures, how they form stars, the motions of gas in the galaxies, the relationship of "normal" matter to unseen "dark matter," and many others. ...> Full Article |
 | Excitement is rising as ESA is in the final stages of preparation for the first collaborative space mission with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). Chandrayaan-1 will study the Moon in great detail and be the first Indian scientific mission leaving the Earth's vicinity. ...> Full Article |
 | The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Continues - new program of four coordinated surveys will revolutionize the study of the distant universe ...> Full Article |
 | University of Arizona astronomers Glenn Schneider, Michael Meyer and J. Serena Kim are among scientists who combined images from the UA-led infrared camera on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope with images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope into a spectacular image of a star's dust disk dubbed "The Moth." ...> Full Article |
 | The appearance of a very special solar spot on the sun surface a few days ago, signalled to scientists around the world that a new solar cycle had begun. This solar spot also produced two solar blasts. ...> Full Article |
Looking up at the night sky you could be forgiven for believing that the sedate progress of the stars across the firmament belies the serene nature of galaxies. But a closer look at our celestial neighbours reveals that the reality is very different.
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 | Hundreds of millions - or even billions - of years after planets would have initially formed around two unusual stars, a second wave of planetesimal and planet formation appears to be taking place, UCLA astronomers and colleagues believe. ...> Full Article |
Scientists involved in detection of cosmic explosion
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 | A University of Florida-led sky survey that may double the number of known planets outside the solar system is part of a major new survey program announced today at the American Astronomical Society's annual meeting in Austin, Texas. ...> Full Article |
 | NASA will point a power-packed $8.7 million University of Colorado at Boulder space instrument at some of the last unexplored terrain in the inner solar system when the MESSENGER spacecraft whips within 125 miles of Mercury's surface Jan. 14 at a mind-boggling 141,000 miles per hour. ...> Full Article |
 | The shape of the mysterious cloud of antimatter in the central regions of the Milky Way has been revealed by ESA's orbiting gamma-ray observatory Integral. The unexpectedly lopsided shape is a new clue to the origin of the antimatter. ...> Full Article |
 | The infrared sky is expanding significantly for the world astronomical community with the first world release of data (DR1) from the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS). ...> Full Article |
A team of scientists have announced the beginning of a new multi-year survey, the third generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which will use a suite of new instruments to investigate a wide range of scientific topics. Building on eight years of extraordinary discoveries by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS and SDSS-II), the new program of four coordinated surveys will revolutionize the study of the distant universe, the Milky Way galaxy, and giant planets orbiting other stars, and the largest of these surveys will use a novel and powerful technique to study dark energy, one of the biggest mysteries in contemporary science.
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 | NASA has announced 7 February 2008 as the target launch date for Space Shuttle Atlantis' STS-122 mission to carry the European Columbus laboratory into space. For the latest updates, please consult the NASA website and the ESA Columbus blog. ...> Full Article |
 | Having the sharpest pictures always is a big advantage, and a sophisticated radio-astronomy technique using continent-wide and even intercontinental arrays of telescopes is yielding extremely valuable scientific results in a wide range of specialties. That's the message delivered to the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Austin, Texas, by Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a leading researcher in the field of ultra-precise astronomical position measurements. ...> Full Article |
 | NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a never-before-seen optical alignment in space: a pair of glowing rings, one nestled inside the other like a bull's-eye pattern. The double-ring pattern is caused by the complex bending of light from two distant galaxies strung directly behind a foreground massive galaxy, like three beads on a string. ...> Full Article |
A new study using results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory provides one of the best pieces of evidence yet that many supermassive black holes are spinning extremely rapidly, according to a research team led by a Penn State astronomer. The whirling of these giant black holes drives powerful jets that pump huge amounts of energy into their environment and affects the growth of galaxies.
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 | For the first time astronomers are able to see indirect evidence of dark matter and how this invisible force impacts on the crowded and violent lives of galaxies. University of British Columbia researcher Catherine Heymans has produced the highest resolution map of dark matter ever captured before. ...> Full Article |
It turns out that our math teachers were right: being able to solve problems without a calculator does come in handy in the "real" world. Two theoretical physicists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have used what they call "pen-and-paper math" to describe the motion of interstellar shock waves - violent events associated with the birth of stars and planets.
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 | Our planet is changing before our eyes, and as a result, many species are living on the edge. Yet Earth has been on the edge of habitability from the beginning. New work by astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shows that if Earth had been slightly smaller and less massive, it would not have plate tectonics - the forces that move continents and build mountains. And without plate tectonics, life might never have gained a foothold on our world. ...> Full Article |
 | A researcher who attended the UA as an undergraduate led the team. ...> Full Article |
A team of Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-II) scientists, led by Princeton University's Reinabelle Reyes and including astronomers at Penn State, has identified a large number of "hidden quasars" -- supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies that are shrouded in light-absorbing dust and gas. According to Donald Schneider, coauthor of the paper and professor of astronomy at Penn State, "If one examines a photograph of one of the hidden quasars we discovered, it appears to be just an ordinary galaxy, although quasars are typically are 10 to 100 times more luminous than the Milky Way Galaxy." Schneider is the chair of the SDSS-II science group that studies quasars, which are powered by glowing, super-heated gas as it swirls into black holes a billion times more massive than the sun.
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 | Heat from a titanic whack explains the extra energy ...> Full Article |
 | Carnegie Mellon University joined the collaboration building the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) and is now among the 23 universities, national laboratories and corporations involved in constructing the world's most powerful survey telescope. ...> Full Article |
 | Astronomers at Rutgers and Penn State universities have discovered galaxies in the distant universe that are ancestors of spiral galaxies like our Milky Way. ...> Full Article |
 | Discovery of two new components within a puzzling spiral galaxy confirm it must have a pair of arms winding in the opposite direction from most galaxies, according to results being presented today to the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas. Presenting the results are Drs. Gene Byrd and Ron Buta, from The University of Alabama; Tarsh Freeman, Bevill Community College; and Dr. Sethanne Howard, retired from the U.S. Naval Observatory. ...> Full Article |
 | Samples of the material picked up during the NASA Stardust mission indicate that parts of the comet Wild 2 actually formed in an area close to the sun. ...> Full Article |
 | A team of scientists from the Naval Research Laboratory, the Air Force Research Laboratory's (AFRL's) Research Vehicles Directorate, Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., and the University of New Mexico (UNM) has detected the lowest frequency radar echo from the moon ever seen with earth-based receivers. ...> Full Article |
 | Four years ago, NASA's Stardust spacecraft chased down a comet and collected grains of dust blowing off its nucleus. When the spacecraft Comet Wild-2 returned, comet dust was shipped to scientists all over the world, including University of Minnesota physics professor Bob Pepin. After testing helium and neon trapped in the dust specks, Pepin and his colleagues report that while the comet formed in the icy fringes of the solar system, the dust appears to have been born close to the infant sun and bombarded by intense radiation from these and other gases before being flung out beyond Neptune and trapped in the comet. ...> Full Article |
New Mexico Tech's Magdalena Ridge Observatory (MRO) is already making its mark in the annals of astronomy research after being recently tasked by NASA to make detailed observations of an asteroid that is now given a 1 in 75 chance of hitting Mars on January 30, 2008.
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 | A new 11-year cycle of heightened solar activity, bringing with it increased risks for power grids, critical military, civilian and airline communications, GPS signals and even cell phones and ATM transactions, showed signs it was on its way late Thursday when the cycle's first sunspot appeared in the sun's Northern Hemisphere, NOAA scientists said. ...> Full Article |
 | MESSENGER's mid-December trajectory correction maneuver (TCM-19) went so well that the mission's design and navigation teams have decided that a TCM scheduled for January 10 will not be needed. ...> Full Article |
 | The first definitive evidence of cosmic dust, important in building planets like our Earth and ultimately ourselves, has been found in the remains of a massive star explosion 11,000 light years away in our own Galaxy. ...> Full Article |
 | After receiving its first fresh, full coat of paint in more than 40 years, Arecibo Observatory made its first observation in more than six months at 6:36 a.m., Saturday, Dec. 8. ...> Full Article |
 | Astronomers have found the first indications of highly complex organic molecules in the disk of red dust surrounding a distant star. The eight-million-year-old star, known as HR 4796A, is inferred to be in the late stages of planet formation, suggesting that the basic building blocks of life may be common in planetary systems. ...> Full Article |
 | Saturn's chilly north pole boasts a hot spot in the middle of its mysterious polar hexagon, according to new data from the Cassini spacecraft. The discovery could shed light on the atmospheric formations found on other planets such as Jupiter, Neptune and Mars. ...> Full Article |
Celestial collision on Jan. 30 would be a bonanza for Earthlings, scientists say
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 | Nestled high in the Andes Mountains of northern Chile, a rocky plot of ground will be the site for the world's largest telescope - one so powerful that it is expected to give perhaps the first definitive answer of whether or not there is life beyond Earth. ...> Full Article |
 | An international team of physicists, including University of Oregon scientists, has concluded that last February's intense burst of gamma rays possibly coming from the Andromeda Galaxy lacked a gravitational wave. That absence, they say, rules out an initial interpretation that the burst came from merging neutron stars or black holes within Andromeda. ...> Full Article |
 | An asteroid discovered by The University of Arizona's Catalina Sky Survey has a 4 percent chance of hitting Mars on Jan. 30, scientists say. ...> Full Article |
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Project will announce today, Jan. 3, its receipt of two major gifts: $20 million from the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences and $10 million from Microsoft founder Bill Gates. "The LSST is an extremely ambitious project that will have enormous impact on a wide range of scientific questions," said Niel Brandt, Penn State professor of astronomy and the leader of the LSST ActiveGalaxy/Quasar team. "We are quite excited about the multitude of research opportunities -- ranging from potential killer asteroids in our solar system to the most distant objects in the universe -- that will be available for Penn State scientists."
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 | Armchair astronomers using the galaxyzoo.org website have identified over 500 overlapping galaxies in the local Universe when astronomers had previously only known of 20 such systems. ...> Full Article |
 | New observations from Suzaku, a joint Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NASA X-ray observatory, have challenged scientists' conventional understanding of white dwarfs. Observers had believed white dwarfs were inert stellar corpses that slowly cool and fade away, but the new data tell a completely different story. ...> Full Article |
 | A model of the James Webb Space Telescope's Mid-InfraRed Instrument is being tested at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, England to ensure the final instrument can see infrared light. ...> Full Article |
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