Space

Neutrinos: Messengers Of The Universe Usher In A 'New Age Of Astronomy'

Neutrinos can pass right through your body, the walls of your house, entire planets, even emerging from near the surface of fascinating and frightening black holes.  And now, an international scientific collaboration  using the IceCube Neutrino Observator ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 21 2013 - 6:20pm

95 GeV: A 'Watershed' Cosmic Blast

Recently, a gamma-ray burst occurred with an optical flash that peaked at magnitude 7 on the astronomical brightness scale, easily visible through binoculars. It is the second-brightest flash ever seen from a gamma-ray burst.  On April 27th, a blast of li ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 22 2013 - 12:16pm

Our Pill-popping Galaxy May Be Hooked On Gas

Our Galaxy may have been swallowing "pills" — clouds of gas with a magnetic wrapper — to keep making stars for the past eight billion years, according to CSIRO astronomer Dr. Alex Hill and colleagues, in their study of the Smith Cloud, a large g ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 1 2013 - 7:00am

Heavy Atoms Are Why Black Hole Jets Pack A Powerful Punch

In boxing a devastating puncher has heavy hands. On a cosmic scale, the high-speed 'jets' spat out by black holes pack a lot of power because they contain heavy atoms, astronomers have found. Black-hole jets recycle matter and energy into space ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 2 2013 - 4:30am

Reverse Shock Waving Moving At Mach 1000 Lights Up Tycho's Supernova

When a star goes supernova, it shines brightly for a few weeks or months before fading away. Yet the material blasted outward from the explosion glows hundreds or thousands of years later, leaving a picturesque supernova remnant. But how? Tycho's sup ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 26 2013 - 7:00am

Spirals, Figure 8's And Peanut Shells: Go Home Milky Way, You're Drunk

A few months ago astronomers created a new 3-D map of stars at the center of our Galaxy which cleared showed the bulge at its core. Previous explanations suggested that the stars that form the bulge are in banana-like orbits, but a paper published in Mont ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 29 2013 - 2:28pm

Hot Jupiter! Subtle Signals Of Water On 5 Hazy Exoplanets

Separate teams of scientists have found faint signatures of water in the atmospheres of five distant planets, the first study to conclusively measure and compare the profiles and intensities of these signatures on multiple worlds. The five planets- WASP-1 ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 3 2013 - 6:42pm

Ocean Currents Of Jupiter's Moon Europa Shape Icy Shell In Ways Critical For Habitation

A model has shown that the subsurface ocean on Jupiter's moon Europa may have deep currents and circulation patterns with heat and energy transfers capable of sustaining biological life. Astronomers believe Europa is one of the planetary bodies in ou ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 4 2013 - 6:00am

Earth's Van Allen Belts- Particle Accelerators In The Sky

Over a year after being launched, NASA's Van Allen Probes mission continues to unravel the mysteries of Earth's high-energy radiation belts that encircle our planet and pose hazards to orbiting satellites and astronauts- termed the Van Allen Rad ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 5 2013 - 6:30am

Circinus X-1: 2,500 Year Old Supernova Has A Neutron Star Hidden In Its Core

Astronomers have identified the glowing wreck of a star that exploded a mere 2,500 years ago — the blink of an eye in astronomical terms- and revealed an astrophysical novelty of the Milky Way. ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 4 2013 - 5:11pm