Monthly Archives: February 2015
On December 27, 2014, while scanning the southern sky as part of the Dark Energy Survey, researchers snapped a picture of comet Lovejoy. The survey uses the 4-meter Victor M.Blanco Telescope located at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The image was captured using the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera, the world’s most powerful digital camera.
High above the spiral Milky Way, astronomers have spotted two clusters of new stars growing at the fringes of our galaxy. The discovery, led by Denilso Camargo of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre Brazil, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, appears to be the first such stellar cradles found outside the galactic disk.
Over 10 days in December 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope took 342 images of the same tiny patch of sky in the constellation Ursa Major. The resulting data set, the Hubble Deep Field, revolutionized the study of the early universe by revealing the profusion of galaxies in that faint and distant era when the first galaxies were forming.
Quasars — supermassive black holes found at the centre of distant massive galaxies — are the most luminous beacons in the sky. These central supermassive black holes actively accrete the surrounding materials and release a huge amount of their gravitational energy.
Why should our solar system’s planets get all the attention? There are things about our own Moon that we either still don’t know or have just learned about, half a century after 12 human beings walked on it. Other moons may harbor life or contain evidence about incredibly violent events that have changed the very nature of the solar system. A few moons are just plain spectacular, like Charon. What’s Charon, you ask?
A little exoplanet living in a neighboring star system has caused a very big stir among scientists. It may be too hot for life to survive on its surface, but the discovery of an Earth-sized planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B has ignited hope that the star — one of two that orbit one another as a binary pair — could play host to a whole system of rocky worlds. But before we plan a trip to Alpha Centauri star system, what we need to know about this earth-sized world. Here is an astronomy guide for Alpha Centauri Bb.
What is hiding in the large disk of gas and dust encircling the 20 million-year-old star Beta Pictoris? In 1984 Beta Pictoris was the very first star discovered to be surrounded by a bright disk of dust and debris. Since then, Beta Pictoris has been an object of intense scrutiny with Hubble and ground-based telescopes.
Renowned scientist Professor Stephen Hawking has claimed that the survival of the human race depends on colonizing other planets. He also stated that aggression is the trait that could lead to the demise of humanity. He added, space represents the long term future of the human race and can act as “life insurance” for the species.
Dark matter and black holes are some of the most mysterious things in the Universe, so a connection between the two is absolutely thrilling. In a new study of elliptical galaxies led by Dr Akos Bogdan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has revealed a surprising link between galaxies’ dark matter halos and their central black holes.
Every 250m years the sun, with its entourage of planets, completes a circuit of the Milky Way. Its journey around its home galaxy, though, is no stately peregrination. Rather, its orbit oscillates up and down through the galactic disc. It passes through that disc, the place where most of the galaxy’s matter is concentrated, once every 30m years or so.
The latest images of Ceres, captured by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft as it comes ever closer to its rendezvous with the dwarf planet, are the sharpest yet obtained, scientists say. Taken as Dawn moves toward entering orbit around Ceres on March 6, the new and improved images have raised more questions about the dwarf planet and its surface than they have provided answers, say scientists.
Two extraordinary events are underway in February in science and technology, the first in quantum physics and the other in computer security. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN will be brought back online next month to face its next challenge, to seek evidence confirming the validity of extensions to the Standard Model of physics in general, and the ominously-named ‘dark matter’, in particular.