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Astronomy News and Research - January 2010 Archives
 | Differences in the number and speed of cometary impacts onto Jupiter's large moons Ganymede and Callisto some 3.8 billion years ago can explain their vastly different surfaces and interior states, according to research by scientists at the Southwest Research Institute appearing online in Nature Geoscience Jan. 24, 2010. ...> Full Article |
 | Packed with novel devices and science instruments, Proba-2 is demonstrating technologies for future ESA missions while providing new views of our sun. ...> Full Article |
Astronomers have found an example of the rare type of supernova thought to produce Gamma Ray Bursts, but through radio, not gamma-ray, observations. The breakthrough, they say, will lead to discovering many more of these objects.
...> Full Article
 | Astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope have detected, in another galaxy, a stellar-mass black hole much farther away than any other previously known. With a mass above fifteen times that of the Sun, this is also the second most massive stellar-mass black hole ever found. It is entwined with a star that will soon become a black hole itself. ...> Full Article |
 | Michigan State University astronomer Megan Donahue uses words such as "cool" and "interesting" to describe the two distinct "tails" found on a long tail of gas that is believed to be forming stars where few stars have been formed before. ...> Full Article |
 | ESO has just released a stunning new image of the vast cloud known as the Cat's Paw Nebula or NGC 6334. This complex region of gas and dust, where numerous massive stars are born, lies near the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, and is heavily obscured by intervening dust clouds. ...> Full Article |
 | New research by MIT Professor of Planetary Science Richard Binzel examines the opposite scenario: that Earth has considerable influence on asteroids -- and from a distance much larger than previously thought. The finding helps answer an elusive, decades-long question about where most meteorites come from before they fall to Earth and also opens the door to a new field study of asteroid seismology. ...> Full Article |
 | An international team led by a cosmologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has extended the relationship between the x-ray luminosity and the mass of galaxy clusters as measured by gravitational lensing, improving the reliability of mass measurements of much older, more distant, and smaller galactic structures. These refined measurements will benefit both the understanding of dark matter and the nature of dark energy as well. ...> Full Article |
On Nov. 13, the European Space Agency's comet orbiter spacecraft, Rosetta, swooped by Earth for its third and final gravity assist on the way to humankind's first rendezvous to orbit and study a comet in more detail than has ever been attempted.
...> Full Article
 | Astronomers from Caltech and other institutions, using the highly sensitive 10-meter Keck I telescope atop Hawaii's Mauna Kea, have detected an extrasolar planet with a mass just four times that of Earth. The planet, which orbits its parent star HD156668 about once every four days, is the second-smallest world among the more than 400 exoplanets (planets located outside our solar system) that have been found to date. ...> Full Article |
 | Two University of Iowa researchers have made the first direct radio image of a stellar coronal loop at a star, other than the sun, thereby providing scientists with information that may lead to a better understanding of how such phenomena as space weather affect the Earth. ...> Full Article |
 | For the first time, two astronomers have explained the diversity of galaxy shapes seen in the universe. The scientists, Dr. Andrew Benson of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Dr. Nick Devereux of Embry-Riddle University in Arizona, tracked the evolution of galaxies over thirteen billion years from the early Universe to the present day. Their results appear in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. ...> Full Article |
 | By studying a triple planetary system that resembles a scaled-up version of our own Sun's family of planets, astronomers have been able to obtain the first direct spectrum -- the "chemical fingerprint" -- of a planet orbiting a distant star, thus bringing new insights into the planet's formation and composition. The result represents a milestone in the search for life elsewhere in the Universe. ...> Full Article |
 | An intercontinental radio-telescope system has revealed a giant magnetic loop sweeping through the space between a pair of stars in the famous naked-eye system Algol. ...> Full Article |
 | Researchers of the University of Granada have conducted the most complete worldwide analysis of the chemical composition and evolutionary state of a spectral type R carbon star. The presence of carbon is essential for the possible development of life in the Universe, and therefore explaining its origin is of vital importance. ...> Full Article |
 | Ever since NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, mission scientists released the first comprehensive sky map of our solar system's edge in particles, solar physicists have been busy revising their models to account for the discovery of a narrow "ribbon" of bright emission that was completely unexpected and not predicted by any model at the time. ...> Full Article |
 | NASA is building a new space telescope named 'NuSTAR' to answer a question that has been vexing astrophysicists for decades: Why won't the supernova explode? ...> Full Article |
New simulations presented this week at the 2010 meeting of the American Astronomical Society show how planets form and maintain an orbit around a developing solar system. Until now, models plunged Earth-like objects into the stars they orbit.
...> Full Article
 | Studies of two supernova remnants using the Japan-US Suzaku observatory have revealed never-before-seen embers of the high-temperature fireballs that immediately followed the explosions. Even after thousands of years, gas within these stellar wrecks retain the imprint of temperatures 10,000 times hotter than the sun's surface. ...> Full Article |
 | The quest to discover whether Mars ever hosted an environment friendly to microscopic forms of life has just gotten a shot in the arm. ...> Full Article |
When scientists confirmed in October that they had detected the first rocky planet outside our solar system, it advanced the longtime quest to find an Earth-like planet hospitable to life. The rocky planet CoRoT-7 b is, however, a forbidding place. If its orbit is not almost perfectly circular, then the planet might be undergoing continuous, fierce volcanic eruptions.
...> Full Article
 | Radio astronomers have uncovered 17 millisecond pulsars in our galaxy by studying unknown high-energy sources detected by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The astronomers made the discovery in less than three months. Such a jump in the pace of locating these hard-to-find objects holds the promise of using them as a kind of "galactic GPS" to detect gravitational waves passing near Earth. ...> Full Article |
 | An international research project involving the University of Adelaide has revealed that the magnetic field in the center of the Milky Way is at least 10 times stronger than the rest of the galaxy. ...> Full Article |
 | The discovery of 17 new millisecond pulsars was announced at the American Astronomical Society Meeting by scientists from the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Space Science Division and a team of international researchers. ...> Full Article |
 | In two new videos from NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft, bright flashes of light known as sun glints act as beacons signaling large bodies of water on Earth. These observations give scientists a way to pick out planets beyond our solar system (extrasolar planets) that are likely to have expanses of liquid, and so stand a better chance of having life. ...> Full Article |
 | The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has broken the distance limit for galaxies and uncovered a primordial population of compact and ultra-blue galaxies that have never been seen before. The data from the Hubble's new infrared camera have been analyzed by five international teams of astronomers. Some of these early results are being presented by various team members on Jan. 6, 2010, at the 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C., USA. ...> Full Article |
 | University of Notre Dame astronomer Peter Garnavich and a team of collaborators have discovered a distant star that exploded when its center became so hot that matter and anti-matter particle pairs were created. ...> Full Article |
 | The most earthlike planet yet found around another star may be the rocky remains of a Saturn-sized gas giant, according to research presented today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington. ...> Full Article |
 | In ancient mythological times reflective surfaces like shiny metals and mirrors were thought to be magical and credited with the ability to look into the future. NASA is using mirrors to do just the opposite -- look into the past. ...> Full Article |
 | A breakthrough in discovering new millisecond pulsars is providing astronomers a greatly improved capability to use those natural cosmic tools to make the first direct detections of gravitational waves. ...> Full Article |
In their quest to find solar systems analogous to ours, astronomers have determined how common our solar system is. They've concluded that about 10 percent of stars in the universe host systems of planets like our own, with several gas giant planets in the outer part of the solar system.
...> Full Article
 | Solar physicists attempting to unlock the mysteries of the solar corona have found another piece of the puzzle by observing the sun's outer atmosphere during eclipses. ...> Full Article |
 | The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has passed a key milestone crucial for the high quality images that will be the trademark of this revolutionary new tool for astronomy. Astronomers and engineers have successfully linked three of the observatory's antennas at the observing site in Chile. Having three antennas observing in unison paves the way for precise images of the cool Universe at unprecedented resolution, by providing the missing link to correct errors that arise when only two antennas are used. ...> Full Article |
The Magellanic Stream, a giant flow of gas from neighbor galaxies around our own Milky Way, is much longer and older than previously thought. The new observations support a new insight on what started this intergalactic gas streamer.
...> Full Article
 | Spectacular satellite images suggest that Mars was warm enough to sustain lakes three billion years ago, a period that was previously thought to be too cold and arid to sustain water on the surface, according to research published today in the journal Geology. ...> Full Article |
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