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Astronomy News and Research - May 2009 Archives
Using new data from ESA's XMM-Newton spaceborne observatory, astronomers have probed closer than ever to a supermassive black hole lying deep at the core of a distant active galaxy.
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 | A telescope designed by a University of Miami physicist and an international team of collaborators has produced the clearest images of starburst galaxies, revealing a new picture of the universe in its early stages ...> Full Article |
 | The joint Japan-US Suzaku mission is providing new insight into how assemblages of thousands of galaxies pull themselves together. For the first time, Suzaku has detected X-ray-emitting gas at a cluster's outskirts, where a billion-year plunge to the center begins. ...> Full Article |
New radio surveys could turn up many supernovas hidden within gas and dust
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 | Using data from NASA's THEMIS mission, a team of University of Alberta researchers has pinpointed the impact epicenter of an earthbound space storm as it crashes into the atmosphere, and given an advance warning of its arrival. ...> Full Article |
 | ESO's Very Large Telescope, Europe's flagship facility for ground-based astronomy, has been equipped with the first of its second generation instruments: X-shooter. It can record the entire spectrum of a celestial object in one shot -- from the ultraviolet to the near-infrared -- with high sensitivity. This unique new instrument will be particularly useful for the study of distant exploding objects called gamma-ray bursts. ...> Full Article |
 | The historic and successful Hubble Servicing Mission 4 concluded with a trouble-free Space Shuttle landing on Sunday. During a series of unprecedented spacewalks, astronauts replaced and repaired a total of four instruments. The Wide Field Camera 3 and Cosmic Origins Spectrograph were installed and the Advanced Camera for Surveys and Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph were successfully repaired. ...> Full Article |
A team of astronomers and astrobiologists has devised a technique to tell whether small Earth-like planets orbiting other suns harbor liquid water, which in turn could tell whether they might be able to support life.
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After thoroughly investigating Victoria Crater on Mars for two years, the instruments aboard the Rover Opportunity reveal more evidence of our neighboring red planet's windy, wet and wild past.
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Changes observed in a unique-double-star system are giving astronomers a glimpse of what they believe is the mechanism for "spinning up" the superfast neutron stars known as millisecond pulsars.
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 | Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have succeeded in measuring the size of giant galaxy Messier 87 and were surprised to find that its outer parts have been stripped away by still unknown effects. The galaxy also appears to be on a collision course with another giant galaxy in this very dynamic cluster. ...> Full Article |
 | NJIT's new 1.6-meter clear aperture solar telescope -- the largest of its kind in the world—is now operational. The unveiling of this remarkable instrument -- said to be the pathfinder for all future, large ground-based telescopes -- could not have come at a more auspicious moment for science. This year marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo's telescope that he used to demonstrate that sunspots are indeed on the Sun. ...> Full Article |
 | A simple new method standardizes the brightness of Type Ia supernovae ...> Full Article |
 | Although engineers, scientists and manufacturers are still in the process of building all of the instruments that will fly aboard NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, they had to figure out long ago, how it was going to "unfold" in space. That's because the Webb Telescope is so big that it has to be folded up for launch. Now, animators have made that "unfolding" come to life in two new videos. ...> Full Article |
 | The Whole Earth Telescope, a worldwide network of observatories coordinated by the University of Delaware, is synchronizing its lenses to provide round-the-clock coverage of a cooling star. As the star dims in the twilight of its life, scientists hope it will shed light on the workings of our own planet and other mysteries of the galaxy. ...> Full Article |
 | The international QUIET collaboration will deploy a new gravity-wave probe in June. QUIET's goal: detect remnants of the radiation emitted at the earliest moments of the universe, when gravity waves rippled through the very fabric of space-time itself. Gravity waves have been called the smoking gun of cosmic inflation, when space expanded faster than the speed of light a tiny fraction of a second following the big bang. ...> Full Article |
 | New dark energy model includes cosmological phase transition ...> Full Article |
When the space shuttle Atlantis takes off May 11, it will be carrying a new instrument for the Hubble Space Telescope, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, that will scan the universe in the near and far ultraviolet in search of clues to the origin and evolution of galaxies. The far UV detector, built at UC Berkeley, will extend observations that began in 1999 with NASA's FUSE mission.
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 | Scientists using NASA's fleet of THEMIS spacecraft have discovered how radio waves produced by electrons injected into Earth's near-space environment both generate and remove high-speed "killer" electrons. ...> Full Article |
A new way of reading light will sharpen the view of planets around other stars
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Whatever dark energy is, explanations for it have less wiggle room following a Hubble Space Telescope observation that has refined the measurement of the universe's present expansion rate to a precision where the error is smaller than 5 percent.
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 | Using high-resolution and multispectral images, researchers have started the difficult process of determining the composition of Mercury's crust and chronicling its origin and evolution. ...> Full Article |
 | Scientists and engineers working on the world's largest ground-based astronomical project, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, have achieved another milestone -- the successful linking of two ALMA astronomical antennas, synchronized with a precision of one millionth of a millionth of a second -- to observe the planet Mars. ALMA is under construction by an international partnership in the Chilean Andes. ...> Full Article |
Research by a theoretical physicist at Indiana University shows that the crusts of neutron stars are 10 billion times stronger than steel or any other of the earth's strongest metal alloys.
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New insights into Milky Way satellite galaxies raise awkward questions for cosmologists
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 | On May 11, 2009, the Space Shuttle Atlantis will launch with a crew of seven to visit the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and carry out the fifth and final servicing mission. The replacement and repair of several instruments will see Hubble equipped to continue its program of discovery well into the next decade. ...> Full Article |
 | Since its launch last June, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered a new class of pulsars, probed gamma-ray bursts and watched flaring jets in galaxies billions of light-years away. Today at the American Physical Society meeting in Denver, Colo., Fermi scientists revealed new details about high-energy particles implicated in a nearby cosmic mystery. ...> Full Article |
NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft served up another curveball to a University of Colorado at Boulder team after a second flyby of the hot inner planet Oct. 6 detected magnesium -- an element created inside exploding stars and which is found in many medicine cabinets on Earth -- clumped in the tenuous atmosphere of the planet.
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 | A previously unknown, large impact basin has been discovered by the MESSENGER spacecraft during its second flyby of Mercury in October 2008. The impact basin, now named Rembrandt, more than 700 kilometers (430 miles) in diameter. If the Rembrandt basin had formed on the east coast of the United States, it would span the distance between Washington, D.C., and Boston. ...> Full Article |
 | An extremely deep Chandra X-ray Observatory image of a region near the center of our Galaxy has resolved a long-standing mystery about an X-ray glow along the plane of the Galaxy. The glow in the region covered by the Chandra image was discovered to be caused by hundreds of point-like X-ray sources, implying that the glow along the plane of the Galaxy is due to millions of such sources. ...> Full Article |
It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie: Rogue black holes roaming our galaxy, threatening to swallow anything that gets too close. In fact, new calculations by Ryan O'Leary and Avi Loeb, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, suggest that hundreds of massive black holes, left over from the galaxy-building days of the early universe, may wander the Milky Way.
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The NRL's Heliospheric Imager has been chosen as part of the scientific payload for the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter mission. SoloHI will provide revolutionary measurements to pinpoint solar storms known as coronal mass ejections. CMEs are violent eruptions with masses greater than a few billion tons, and have been compared to hurricanes due to widespread disruption of communications and power systems they can cause when directed at Earth.
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 | Tel Aviv University finds that comets contain key ingredients for life on Earth. ...> Full Article |
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