http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/astronomy-blog.html Astronomy blog From Astronomy blog Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:02:31 GMT en-us http://www.astronomy-blog.com/images/blogs/astronomy-blog-22390.jpg http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/astronomy-blog.html 100 75 http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/two-planets-transiting-same-star.html http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/two-planets-transiting-same-star.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:02:31 GMT NASA's Kepler Mission has discovered the first confirmed planetary system with more than one planet transiting the same star. Today's announcement of the discovery of the two planets, Kepler 9b and 9c, is based on seven months of observations of more than 156,000 stars being monitored for subtle brightness changes as part of an ongoing search for Earth-like planets outside our solar system. Scientists designated the sun-like star Kepler-9........ ]]> http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/pulverized-planet-dust.html http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/pulverized-planet-dust.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:02:31 GMT Tight double-star systems might not be the best places for life to spring up, as per a newly released study using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The infrared observatory spotted a surprisingly large amount of dust around three mature, close-orbiting star pairs. Where did the dust come from? Astronomers say it might be the aftermath of tremendous planetary collisions........ ]]> http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/amazing-new-sun-images.html http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/amazing-new-sun-images.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:02:31 GMT NJIT Distinguished Professor Philip R. Goode and the Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) team have achieved "first light" using a deformable mirror in what is called adaptive optics at Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO). Using this equipment, an image of a sunspot was published yesterday on the website of Ciel et l'Espace, as the photo of the day: http://www.cieletespace.fr/node/5752........ ]]> http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/ancient-galaxy-cluster-still-producing-stars.html http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/ancient-galaxy-cluster-still-producing-stars.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:02:31 GMT Much like quiet, middle-aged baby boomers peacefully residing in some of the world's largest cities, families of some galaxies also have a hidden wild youth that they only now are revealing for the first time, as per research by astronomers at Texas AandM University. In ongoing observations of one of the universe's earliest, most distant cluster of galaxies using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, an international team of scientists led by Texas AandM's Dr. Kim-Vy Tran has discovered that a significant fraction of those ancient galaxies are still actively forming stars........ ]]> http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/spotting-stellar-nurseries.html http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/spotting-stellar-nurseries.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:02:31 GMT Astronomers scanning the skies as part of ESO's VISTA Magellanic Cloud survey have now obtained a spectacular picture of the Tarantula Nebula in our neighbouring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. This panoramic near-infrared view captures the nebula itself in great detail as well as the rich surrounding area of sky. The image was obtained at the start of a very ambitious survey of our neighbouring galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds, and their environment........ ]]> http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/dark-matter-search-plunges.html http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/dark-matter-search-plunges.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:02:31 GMT This month physicist Juan Collar and his associates are taking their attempt to unmask the secret identity of dark matter into a Canadian mine more than a mile underground. The team is deploying a 4-kilogram bubble chamber at SNOLab, which is part of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Ontario, Canada. A second 60-kilogram chamber will follow later this year. Scientists anticipate that dark matter particles will leave bubbles in their tracks when passing through the liquid in one of these chambers........ ]]> http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/7-2010/refining-a-cosmic-clock.html http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/7-2010/refining-a-cosmic-clock.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:02:31 GMT Physicists will soon have a better measure of the age of our galaxy, thanks to experiments described in a trio of papers appearing in the journal Physical Review C The papers report on experiments at the CERN neutron time-of-flight (n_TOF) facility and the Karlsruhe Van de Graaff accelerator that clarify the processes that affect the abundance of the element osmium-187. The element is created when rhenium-187 decays. Because rhenium-187 was produced in the first stellar explosions after the birth of the galaxy, measuring the amounts of rhenium-187 and osmium-187 we observe today can provide an estimate of the galaxy's age. In effect, the elements act as a cosmic clock that started ticking when the galaxy was born........ ]]> http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/7-2010/an-unusual-cosmic-lens.html http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/7-2010/an-unusual-cosmic-lens.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:02:31 GMT Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Ecole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have discovered the first known case of a distant galaxy being magnified by a quasar acting as a gravitational lens. The discovery, based in part on observations done at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Hawaii's Mauna Kea, is being published July 16 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics....... ]]> http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/7-2010/image-of-cosmic-concoction.html http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/7-2010/image-of-cosmic-concoction.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:02:31 GMT Strangely shaped dust clouds, resembling spilled liquids, are silhouetted against a colourful background of glowing gas in this newly released Hubble image. The star-forming region NGC 2467 is a vast cloud of gas mostly hydrogen that serves as an incubator for new stars. Some of these youthful stars have emerged from the dense clouds where they were born and now shine brightly, hot and blue in this picture, but a number of others remain hidden........ ]]> http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/7-2010/newborn-stars-discovered.html http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/7-2010/newborn-stars-discovered.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:02:31 GMT A wave of massive star formation appears poised to begin within a mysterious, dark cloud in the Milky Way. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed a secluded birthplace for stars within a wispy, dark cloud named named M17 SWex. The dark cloud is part of the larger, parent nebula known as M17, a vast region of our galaxy with a bright, central star cluster. "We believe we've managed to observe this dark cloud in a very early phase of star formation before its most massive stars have ignited," said Penn State astronomer Matthew Povich, a postdoctoral fellow and the main author of a study published recently in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The new research could shed light on the question of how and when massive stars form........ ]]> http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/6-2010/zapping-titan-like-atmosphere-with-uv-rays.html http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/6-2010/zapping-titan-like-atmosphere-with-uv-rays.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:02:31 GMT The first experimental evidence showing how atmospheric nitrogen can be incorporated into organic macromolecules is being reported by a University of Arizona team. The finding indicates what organic molecules might be found on Titan, the moon of Saturn that researchers think is a model for the chemistry of pre-life Earth........ ]]> http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/6-2010/widespread-glacial-meltwater-valleys-on-mars.html http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/6-2010/widespread-glacial-meltwater-valleys-on-mars.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:02:31 GMT Planetary researchers have uncovered telltale signs of water on Mars - frozen and liquid - in the earliest period of the Red Planet's history. A new claim, made public this month, is that a deep ocean covered some of the northern latitudes. But the evidence for water grows much more scant after the Noachian era, which ended 3.5 billion years ago. Now Brown University planetary geologists have documented running water that sprang from glaciers throughout the Martian middle latitudes as recently as the Amazonian epoch, several hundred million years ago. These glaciofluvial valleys were, in essence, tributaries of water created when enough sunlight reached the glaciers to melt a thin layer on the surface. This, the Brown scientists write, led to "limited surface melting" that formed channels that ran for several kilometers and could be more than 150 feet wide........ ]]> http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/6-2010/was-venus-once-a-habitable-planet.html http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/6-2010/was-venus-once-a-habitable-planet.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:02:31 GMT ESA's Venus Express is helping planetary researchers investigate whether Venus once had oceans. If it did, it may even have begun its existence as a habitable planet similar to Earth. These days, Earth and Venus seem completely different. Earth is a lush, clement world teeming with life, whilst Venus is hellish, its surface roasting at temperatures higher than those of a kitchen oven........ ]]> http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/6-2010/ancient-ocean-of-mars.html http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/6-2010/ancient-ocean-of-mars.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:02:31 GMT A vast ocean likely covered one-third of the surface of Mars some 3.5 billion years ago, as per a newly released study conducted by University of Colorado at Boulder scientists. The CU-Boulder study is the first to combine the analysis of water-related features including scores of delta deposits and thousands of river valleys to test for the occurrence of an ocean sustained by a global hydrosphere on early Mars. While the notion of a large, ancient ocean on Mars has been repeatedly proposed and challenged over the past two decades, the newly released study provides further support for the idea of a sustained sea on the Red Planet during the Noachian era more than 3 billion years ago, said CU-Boulder researcher Gaetano Di Achille, main author on the study........ ]]> http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/5-2010/brightest-galaxies-tend-to-cluster.html http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/5-2010/brightest-galaxies-tend-to-cluster.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:02:31 GMT For more than a decade, astronomers have been puzzled by bright galaxies in the distant universe that appear to be forming stars at phenomenal rates. What prompted the prolific star creation, they wondered. And what kind of spatial environment did these galaxies inhabit? Now, using a super-sensitive camera/spectrometer on the Herschel Space Observatory, astronomers - including a UC Irvine team led by Asantha Cooray - have mapped the skies as they appeared 10 billion years ago........ ]]> http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/4-2010/active-galaxys-smokestack.html http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/4-2010/active-galaxys-smokestack.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:02:31 GMT If our eyes could see radio waves, the nearby galaxy Centaurus A (Cen A) would be one of the biggest and brightest objects in the sky, nearly 20 times the apparent size of a full moon. What we can't see when looking at the galaxy in visible light is that it lies nestled between a pair of giant radio-emitting gas plumes ejected by its supersized black hole. Each plume is nearly a million light-years long........ ]]> http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/3-2010/hubble-confirms-cosmic-acceleration.html http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/3-2010/hubble-confirms-cosmic-acceleration.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:02:31 GMT A group of astronomers [1], led by Tim Schrabback of the Leiden Observatory, conducted an intensive study of over 446 000 galaxies within the COSMOS field, the result of the largest survey ever conducted with Hubble. In making the COSMOS survey, Hubble photographed 575 slightly overlapping views of the same part of the Universe using the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) onboard Hubble. It took nearly 1000 hours of observations........ ]]> http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/3-2010/sharpest-view-ever-of-star-factories.html http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/3-2010/sharpest-view-ever-of-star-factories.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:02:31 GMT Astronomers have combined a natural gravitational lens and a sophisticated telescope array to get the sharpest view ever of "star factories" in a galaxy over 10 billion light-years from Earth. They observed that the distant galaxy, known as SMM J2135-0102, is making new stars 250 times faster than our Galaxy, the Milky Way........ ]]> http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/3-2010/early-galaxy-went-through-teenage.html http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/3-2010/early-galaxy-went-through-teenage.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:02:31 GMT Researchers have found a massive galaxy in the early Universe creating stars like our sun up to 100 times faster than the modern-day Milky Way. The team of international researchers, led by Durham University, described the finding as like seeing "a teenager going through a growth spurt". Due to the amount of time it takes light to reach Earth the researchers observed the galaxy as it would have appeared 10 billion years ago just three billion years after the Big Bang........ ]]> http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/3-2010/discovery-of-a-new-planet.html http://www.astronomy-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/3-2010/discovery-of-a-new-planet.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:02:31 GMT An international team of scientists, including several who are affiliated with UC Santa Barbara, has discovered a new planet the size of Jupiter. The finding is reported in the March 18 issue of the journal Nature. The planet, called CoRoT-9b, was discovered by using the CoRoT space telescope satellite, operated by the French space agency, The Centre National d'Études Spatiales, or CNES. The newly discovered planet orbits a star similar to our sun and is located in the constellation Serpens Cauda, at a distance of 1500 light-years from Earth........ ]]>