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Astronomy News and Research - July 2009 Archives
 | Using different state-of-the-art techniques on ESO's Very Large Telescope, two independent teams of astronomers have obtained the sharpest ever views of the supergiant star Betelgeuse. They show that the star has a vast plume of gas almost as large as our Solar System and a gigantic bubble boiling on its surface. These discoveries provide important clues to help explain how these mammoths shed material at such a tremendous rate. ...> Full Article |
NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is making some exciting discoveries about cosmic rays and the Large Area Telescope aboard Fermi is the tool in this investigation. Scientists in the Naval Research Laboratory's Space Science Division were instrumental in the design and development of the Large Area Telescope.
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 | A team of astronomers has discovered a group of rare galaxies called the "Green Peas" with the help of citizen scientists working through an online project called Galaxy Zoo. The finding could lend unique insights into how galaxies form stars in the early universe. ...> Full Article |
 | The checkout and calibration of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has been interrupted to aim the recently refurbished observatory at a new expanding spot on the giant planet Jupiter. The spot, caused by the impact of a comet or an asteroid, is changing from day to day in the planet's cloud tops. ...> Full Article |
Scientists at this observatory outside Hangzhou joined residents and tourists across China and India in observing the longest total solar eclipse in a century and probably the most-viewed ever.
The moon's shadow traced a path across the world's two most populous countries before racing across the Pacific, providing a view of totality for five minutes and 36 seconds for scientists gathered here from around the world as part of the Williams College Eclipse Expedition.
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 | The world will get the first glimpse of what the historic Apollo 11 moonwalk really looked like thanks to the exceptional footage taken from Australian telescopes on July 21 (Australian time), 1969. ...> Full Article |
 | A star does not die without getting noticed and may even leave the universe with "fireworks." At the end of its life cycle, a star begins to collapse in the middle, and throws new material into space. The new material eventually becomes incorporated into new planets and life. Now, a University of Missouri professor identified new features in the material that is being ejected from the dying star Helix Nebula. ...> Full Article |
 | A lunar geochemist at Washington University in St. Louis says that there are still many answers to be gleaned from the moon rocks collected by the Apollo 11 astronauts on their historic moonwalk 40 years ago July 20. And he credits another WUSTL professor for the fact that the astronauts even collected the moon rocks in the first place. ...> Full Article |
 | A new study has revealed the origins of tiger stripes and a subsurface ocean on Enceladus -- one of Saturn's many moons. These geological features are believed to be the result of the moon's unusual chemical composition and not a hot core, shedding light on the evolution of planets and guiding future space exploration. ...> Full Article |
 | A team of international astrophysicists, including Dr. Maria Lugaro from Monash University, has discovered a new explanation for the early composition of our solar system. ...> Full Article |
 | Recently, a mock-up of the OTE's Primary Mirror Backplane Assembly, which supports the James Webb Space Telescope's mirror segments, was used to simulate how the element frame will be handled when the actual components of the telescope are being assembled. ...> Full Article |
 | Today ESO has released a new and stunning image of the sky around the Eagle Nebula, a stellar nursery where infant star clusters carve out monster columns of dust and gas. ...> Full Article |
 | Probable impact scar appears on 15 anniversary of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact ...> Full Article |
 | Looking to the past to prepare for the future ...> Full Article |
 | Establishing a key link between the solar cycle and global climate, research led by scientists at the National Science Foundation-funded National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., shows that maximum solar activity and its aftermath have impacts on Earth that resemble La Niņa and El Niņo events in the tropical Pacific Ocean.
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 | Many of the objects found today in the asteroid belt located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter may have formed in the outermost reaches of the solar system, according to an international team of astronomers led by scientists from Southwest Research Institute. ...> Full Article |
 | A team of researchers from the CSIC-INTA Astrobiology Centre in Madrid has confirmed that the type of mineralogical composition on the surface of Mars influences the measuring of its temperature. The study is published this week in the Journal of Environmental Monitoring and will be used to interpret the data from the soil temperature sensor of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory vehicle, whose launch is envisaged for 2011. ...> Full Article |
For 105 days, a six-man crew called an isolation chamber in Moscow their home. The crew simulated a Mars mission full of experiments and realistic mission scenarios. US participation consisted of three research teams with experiments evaluating solutions to conditions that impact work performance: lighting interventions to counter shift-work sleep loss, tests measuring the impact of stress and fatigue on performance, and assessing interactions between crew members and mission control.
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The study of three of the oldest and most explosive volcanoes on Mars could provide insights into the planet's history, especially implications for water sources.
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 | Herschel has carried out the first test observations with all its instruments, with spectacular results. Galaxies, star-forming regions and dying stars comprised the telescope's first targets. The instruments provided spectacular data at their first attempt, finding water, carbon and revealing dozens of distant galaxies. ...> Full Article |
 | Venus Express has charted the first map of Venus's southern hemisphere at infrared wavelengths. The new map hints that our neighboring world may once have been more Earth-like, with both, a plate tectonics system and an ocean of water. ...> Full Article |
 | New simulations reveal that turbulence created by jets of material ejected from the disks of the universe's largest black holes is responsible for halting star formation ...> Full Article |
 | Four hundred years after Galileo first turned his handmade telescope toward the heavens, the world's largest, most technologically advanced telescope is set to make its formal debut. ...> Full Article |
 | A scientific instrument package developed in part by the University of Colorado at Boulder for the $2.2 billion orbiting Herschel Space Observatory that was launched in May by the European Space Agency has made its first successful observations, targeting two star-forming galaxies near the Milky Way. ...> Full Article |
 | The earliest stars in the universe formed not only as individuals, but sometimes also as twins, according to a paper published today in Science Express. By creating simulations of the early universe, astrophysicists Matthew Turk and Tom Abel of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, located at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and Brian O'Shea of Michigan State University have gained the most detailed understanding to date of the formation of the first stars. ...> Full Article |
 | Galileo knew he had discovered a new planet in 1613, 234 years before its official discovery date, according to a new theory by a University of Melbourne physicist. ...> Full Article |
 | Star clusters point to black holes ejected from host galaxies ...> Full Article |
 | NASA's upcoming mission to study the sun in unprecedented detail and its effects on Earth, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, arrived at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla., on July 9. ...> Full Article |
Dying stars shed light on universe formation 11 billion years ago
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 | A team of astrophysicists has solved a mystery that led some scientists to speculate that the distribution of certain gamma rays in our Milky Way galaxy was evidence of a form of undetectable "dark matter" believed to make up much of the mass of the universe. ...> Full Article |
 | The University of Colorado at Boulder is working with NASA to develop a new communications technology now being tested on the International Space Station, which will extend Earth's Internet into outer space and across the solar system. ...> Full Article |
 | CSIRO astronomers have revealed the hidden face of an enormous galaxy called Centaurus A, which emits a radio glow covering an area 200 times bigger than the full Moon. ...> Full Article |
 | The Omega Nebula, a stellar nursery where infant stars illuminate and sculpt a vast pastel fantasy of dust and gas, is revealed in all its glory by a new ESO image. ...> Full Article |
 | With NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, astronomers now are getting their best look at those whirling stellar cinders known as pulsars. In two studies published in the July 2 edition of Science Express, international teams have analyzed gamma-rays from two dozen pulsars, including 16 discovered by Fermi. Fermi is the first spacecraft able to identify pulsars by their gamma-ray emission alone. ...> Full Article |
 | A new class of pulsars detected by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is solving the mystery of previously unidentified gamma-ray sources and helping scientists understand the mechanisms behind pulsar emissions. ...> Full Article |
 | Mars gets as far as 250 million miles away, but many parts of it closely resemble places on Earth, including its landscape, history of water, soil and even its weather, says a Texas A&M University researcher in the current issue of Science magazine. ...> Full Article |
 | High-resolution radio, gamma-ray observations reveal site of relativistic particle acceleration in galaxy M 87 ...> Full Article |
 | Two University of Hawaii at Manoa astronomers have found a binary star-disk system in which each star is surrounded by the kind of dust disk that is frequently the precursor of a planetary system. Doctoral student Rita Mann and Dr. Jonathan Williams used the Submillimeter Array on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, to make the observations. ...> Full Article |
 | Astronomers have unveiled an unprecedented new atlas of the inner regions of the Milky Way, our home galaxy, peppered with thousands of previously undiscovered dense knots of cold cosmic dust -- the potential birthplaces of new stars. Made using observations from the APEX telescope in Chile, this survey is the largest map of cold dust so far, and will prove an invaluable map for observations made with the forthcoming ALMA telescope, as well as the recently launched ESA Herschel space telescope. ...> Full Article |
 | 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 working well, and have returned images of a region in the lunar highlands south of Mare Nubium (Sea of Clouds). ...> Full Article |
 | Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera releases its first images of the moon ...> Full Article |
The mysterious 1908 Tunguska explosion that leveled 830 square miles of Siberian forest was almost certainly caused by a comet entering the Earth's atmosphere, says new Cornell University research. The conclusion is supported by an unlikely source: the exhaust plume from the NASA space shuttle launched a century later.
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 | A new class of black hole, more than 500 times the mass of the Sun, has been discovered by an international team of astronomers. ...> Full Article |
Millions of would-be galaxies failed to develop after being exposed to intense heat from the first stars and black holes formed in the early Universe, according to new research.
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 | An international team of researchers led by Gillian Wilson, an astronomer at the University of California, Riverside, has completed the largest ever survey designed to find very distant clusters of galaxies. Named the Spitzer Adaptation of the Red-sequence Cluster Survey, "SpARCS" detects galaxy clusters using deep ground-based optical observations. SpARCS is designed to find clusters, snapped as they appeared long ago in time, when the universe was 6 billion years old or younger. ...> Full Article |
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