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Astronomy News and Research - September 2007 Archives
 | In a shock finding, astronomers using CSIRO's Parkes telescope have detected a huge burst of radio energy from the distant universe that could open up a new field in astrophysics. ...> Full Article |
An international team of astronomers is one step closer to answering the question, "Will the world end with a bang or a whimper?"
...> Full Article
 | "We've never seen anything quite like it," says solar physicist Lika Guhathakurta from NASA headquarters. ...> Full Article |
 | Using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer and its unique ability to see small details, astronomers have uncovered a flat, nearly edge-on disc of silicates in the heart of the magnificent Ant Nebula. The disc seems, however, too 'skinny' to explain how the nebula got its intriguing ant-like shape. ...> Full Article |
 | Astronomers have succeeded in tracing the magnetic web that binds newly forming stars to their surrounding gas and dust. ...> Full Article |
 | Using a tether system devised by MIT researchers, astronauts could one day stroll across the surface of small asteroids, collecting samples and otherwise exploring these rocks in space without floating away. ...> Full Article |
 | It is nothing new for the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) to discover another comet - it has already found more than 1350. But the latest is a bit different - SOHO had spotted it twice before. ...> Full Article |
 | A heat-sensitive camera flying on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter has led a team of geologists to find seven deep holes on the flanks of Arsia Mons, a giant volcano on Mars. ...> Full Article |
 | Researchers' equations suggest gravitational lensing could lead astronomers to 'naked singularities,' if such entities exist despite being banned by 'cosmic censorship' ...> Full Article |
 | NASA has announced its intent to restart a small scientific satellite mission it had canceled in 2006 because of funding pressures created in part by the shift in the agency's focus to manned missions to the moon and Mars. ...> Full Article |
 | Every now and then a space rock hits the world's media - sometimes almost literally. Threatening asteroids that zoom past the Earth, fireballs in the sky seen by hundreds of people and mysterious craters which may have been caused by impacting meteorites; all make ESA's studies on the Don Quijote mission look increasingly timely. ...> Full Article |
 | Planetary scientists have found that the southern pole of Mars contains the largest deposit of frozen water in the inner solar system, outside of Earth. ...> Full Article |
 | A team of astronomers has discovered a number of stars forming in a section of our universe that is not normally conducive to the birth of stars. ...> Full Article |
 | Galaxies found under the Glare of Cosmic Flashlights ...> Full Article |
 | Astronomers have pinpointed the origin of powerful bursts from nature's most magnetic objects. ...> Full Article |
 | Key components of a new approach to discover life on planet Mars were successfully launched into space today as part of a twelve-day low Earth orbit experiment to assess their survivability when exposed to the space radiation environment - a prelude to future journeys to Mars. ...> Full Article |
 | The X PRIZE Foundation and Google Inc. announced on September 13 the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a robotic race to the Moon to win a $30 million prize purse. ...> Full Article |
 | Summer season on Neptune creates escape route for methane ...> Full Article |
 | The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) are two of the Milky Way's closest neighboring galaxies. A stunning sight in the southern hemisphere, they were named after Ferdinand Magellan, who explored those waters in the 16th century. For hundreds of years, these galaxies were considered satellites of the Milky Way, gravitationally bound to our home galaxy. New research by Gurtina Besla (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and her colleagues shows that the Magellanic Clouds are recent arrivals on their first visit to the Milky Way's neighborhood. ...> Full Article |
 | Scientists may have solved a discrepancy between the number of extremely small, faint galaxies predicted to exist near the Milky Way and the number actually observed. ...> Full Article |
 | Samples blasted into space to test theories on life being seeded through space on meteorites. ...> Full Article |
 | An experiment that's aimed at healthy space travel and involves Montana State University scientists and students is now orbiting the earth on a Russian space capsule. ...> Full Article |
 | The colorful, intricate shapes in these NASA Hubble Space Telescope images reveal how the glowing gas ejected by dying Sun-like stars evolves dramatically over time. ...> Full Article |
 | An international team of astronomers using the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona has discovered that the Hercules Dwarf Galaxy is shaped like a cigar. That makes it an oddball among millions of its peers. ...> Full Article |
 | Cassini scientists are poring through hundreds of images returned from the 10 September fly-by of Saturn's two-toned moon Iapetus. ...> Full Article |
 | The universe's earliest stars may hold clues to the nature of dark matter, the mysterious stuff that makes up most of the universe's matter but doesn't interact with light, cosmologists report in the 14 September issue of the journal Science. ...> Full Article |
 | These images taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board Mars Express show the mouth of the Tiu Valles channel system on the red planet. ...> Full Article |
 | Astronomers played a key role in discovering one of the most bizarre objects in space: a star "skeleton" of very low mass that is orbiting and being slowly consumed by a pulsar, or remains of a second massive star, that is itself spinning faster than a kitchen blender. ...> Full Article |
 | Cassini completed its closest flyby of the odd moon Iapetus on Sept. 10, 2007. The spacecraft flew about 1,640 kilometers (1,000 miles) from Iapetus' surface and is returning amazing views of the bizarre moon. ...> Full Article |
 | NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity entered Victoria Crater for the first time September 11, 2007. It radioed home information via a relay by NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, reporting its activities for the day. ...> Full Article |
 | Cluster data has helped provide scientists with a new view of magnetospheric processes, challenging existing theories about magnetic substorms that cause aurorae and perturbations in GPS signals. ...> Full Article |
 | A large team of astronomers, including scientists from the University of Delaware and Mt. Cuba Observatory, has announced that at least one planet in the universe has survived the violent events that accompany the late stages of a star's life cycle. ...> Full Article |
 | Astronomers have observed neon in disks of dust and gas swirling around sunlike stars for the first time. ...> Full Article |
 | Work aids understanding of violent universe ...> Full Article |
 | A team of astrophysicists at The University of Western Australia today announced results from a new computer program that predicts when potentially dangerous bursts of gamma radiation may hit our planet. ...> Full Article |
 | Since Sky in Google Earth debuted two weeks ago to let the public explore the heavens from their computers, two University of California, Berkeley, astronomers have jumped in to populate Google's sky with the most recently discovered heavenly objects. ...> Full Article |
 | The National Research Council's Beyond Einstein Program Assessment Committee has recommended that the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM), jointly supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Department of Energy, be the first of NASA's Beyond Einstein cosmology missions to be developed and launched. ...> Full Article |
 | Two crucial tools for a successful landing of America's latest mission to Mars, the radar and UHF radio on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, have passed in-flight checkouts. ...> Full Article |
A ground-based, experimental model used to simulate astronaut weightlessness in space has provided Rutgers scientists an opportunity to study the effects of stress on immune organs.
...> Full Article
 | The impactor believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs and other life forms on Earth some 65 million years ago has been traced back to a breakup event in the main asteroid belt. A joint U.S.-Czech team from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and Charles University in Prague suggests that the parent object of asteroid (298) Baptistina disrupted when it was hit by another large asteroid, creating numerous large fragments that would later create the Chicxulub crater on the Yucatan Peninsula as well as the prominent Tycho crater found on the Moon. ...> Full Article |
 | By the end of 2007, the assembly of the ESA's Herschel far-infrared space observatory - the latest mission to study the formation and evolution of stars and galaxies - will be completed. ...> Full Article |
 | Scientists hope to learn more about climate changes here on Earth by studying Venus. A prototype balloon could eventually study the planet's surface and examine its atmosphere and the bizarre winds and chemistry within it. A team of JPL, ILC Dover and NASA Wallops Flight Facility engineers designed, fabricated and tested the balloon. ...> Full Article |
 | A team of astronomers led by Cambridge University have taken pictures of the stars that are sharper than anything produced by the Hubble telescope, at 50 thousandths of the cost. ...> Full Article |
 | Edwin Hubble once called IC 10 "one of the most curious objects in the sky," and new observations of the extremely faint, lightweight dwarf galaxy are giving scientists new clues about how populations of stars are born. ...> Full Article |
 | Venus Express has now orbited Earth's twin for 500 Earth days, completing as many orbits. While the satellite maintains steady and excellent performance, the planet continues to surprise and amaze us. ...> Full Article |
 | Stars do not like to be alone. Indeed, most stars are members of a binary system, in which two stars circle around each other in an apparently never-ending cosmic ballet. But sometimes, things can go wrong. When the dancing stars are too close to each other, one of them can start devouring its partner. If the vampire star is a white dwarf â€" a burned-out star that was once like our Sun â€" this greed can lead to a cosmic catastrophe: the white dwarf explodes as a Type Ia supernova. ...> Full Article |
 | A year ago, as Europe reached the Moon for the first time, scientists on Earth eagerly watched SMART-1’s spectacular impact. New results from the impact analysis and from the instruments still keep coming. ...> Full Article |
 | International scientific satellite reaches the end of the major phase of its work ...> Full Article |
 | The High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) has confirmed that a dark pit seen on Mars in an earlier HiRISE image really is a vertical shaft that cuts through lava flow on the flank of the Arsia Mons volcano. Such pits form on similar volcanoes in Hawaii and are called "pit craters." ...> Full Article |
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