Space

Is There An Ocean Under The Icy Crust Of Titan?

A new analysis of topographic and gravity data from Titan, the largest moon orbiting Saturn,  indicates its icy outer crust is twice as thick as has generally been thought. Is there a vast ocean of liquid water lies under the crust?. The new study suggest ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 4 2012 - 1:30pm

Starburst Galaxies And A Census Of The Invisible Universe

The combined power of ESA's Herschel space observatory and the ground-based Keck telescopes mean hundreds of previously unseen starburst galaxies have been characterized, revealing extraordinary high star-formation rates across the history of the Uni ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 5 2012 - 6:30am

How To 'Weigh' An Infant Solar System

In the constellation Taurus, astronomers have found the youngest still-forming solar system yet seen- an infant star called  L1527 IRS, surrounded by a swirling disk of dust and gas 450 light-years from Earth. The star only has about one-fifth the mass of ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 10 2012 - 6:00am

Dawn Of Time: When The First Stars Blinked On, There Was No Carbon Or Oxygen

The universe has always had some trace of heavy elements, such as carbon and oxygen, for as far back as astronomers could 'see'. These elements, originally churned from the explosion of massive stars, formed the building blocks for planetary bod ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 10 2012 - 4:01am

Vega, The One Star Brightness To Rule Them All, Is A Little Older Than Thought

Vega is a summer star in the Northern Hemisphere, visible toward the west at sunset. Vega is the brightest star in the constellation Lyra and, at only 25 light years away, quite close, cosmically speaking.  Due to its brightness, Vega has been used by ast ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 12 2012 - 12:32pm

Found: 7 Primitive Galaxies Formed More Than 13 Billion Years Ago

The Hubble Space Telescope has detected seven primitive galaxies formed more than 13 billion years ago, and also a candidate, at redshift 11.9, for the record for the most distant galaxy found to date.  The images offer the deepest ever view of the Univer ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 13 2012 - 4:30am

XMMU J004243.6+412519: Black-Hole Binary At The Eddington Limit

In January of 2012, a new X-ray source flared and rapidly brightened in the Andromeda galaxy (M31), l2.5 million light-years from earth. The event was classified as an ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX), the second ever seen in M31 and efforts with X-ray te ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 12 2012 - 5:39pm

River Like The Nile Seen On Titan

A miniature extraterrestrial version of Africa's Nile River Valley has been spotted on Saturn’s moon Titan- it stretches more than 400 km from its "headwaters" to a large sea.   Have you ever before seen such a large river system in high res ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 12 2012 - 10:29pm

The Gusty Winds Of Space Turbulence Measured In A Terrestrial Lab

There are some kinds of turbulence we know exists but proving it is difficult- turbulence in the ionized gas that fills the universe is one such example. But now a research team says they have directly measured it for the first time- in the laboratory. ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 25 2012 - 12:33am

Dark Matter Is Universally Important But We Are No Closer To Finding It

Recently, more than 100 cosmologists, particle physicists and observational astrophysicists at least agreed that dark matter is important. Of course, you are not getting invited to a colloquium on dark matter sponsored by the University of Chicago and the ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 18 2012 - 6:02pm