Space

Galactic Archaeologists Find New Milky Way Companions Hiding In Plain Sight

When we think of cosmology, we often imagine the largest telescopes peering into the deepest space, collecting the feeble light from exploding stars or the first galaxies. But for some cosmologists – like the Galactic Archaeologists – the focus is the loc ...

Article - The Conversation - Mar 18 2015 - 8:00am

Titius-Bode Law: Planets In The Habitable Zone Around Most Stars

Astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets in our Milky Way galaxy using the Kepler satellite and many of them have multiple planets orbiting the host star. By analyzing these planetary systems, researchers from the Australian National University ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 18 2015 - 1:58am

Watch The Solar Eclipse On Friday!

In the morning of March 20th Europeans will be treated with the amazing show of a total solar eclipse. The path of totality is unfortunately confined to the northern Atlantic ocean, and will miss Iceland and England, passing only over the Faroer islands- ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Mar 18 2015 - 5:29am

The Moon's Strangest Giant Volcanic Eruption Detailed

A new map of the Moon's strangest volcano show that its explosive eruption spread debris over an area in the Compton-Belkovich Volcanic Complex much greater than previously thought. By mapping the radioactive element thorium which spewed out during th ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 18 2015 - 12:00pm

Nova Vulpeculae 1670- Colliding Stars Explain 17th Century Explosion

In 1670, the greatest astronomers, including Cassini and Hevelius, the father of lunar cartography, documented the appearance of a new star in the skies. Hevelius described it as nova sub capite Cygni — a new star below the head of the Swan — and now it is ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 23 2015 - 11:00am

67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko Reveals First Detection Of Molecular Nitrogen On A Comet

ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft has made the first measurement of molecular nitrogen at a comet,  Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko,  providing clues about the temperature environment in which it formed.  ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 19 2015 - 2:33pm

ESA’s CHEOPS Satellite: The Pharaoh of Exoplanet Hunting

Just like the Pharaoh Cheops, who ruled the ancient Old Kingdom of Egypt, ESA’s CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS) could be someday ruling in the field of exoplanet hunting. ...

Blog Post - Tomasz Nowakowski - Mar 19 2015 - 5:23pm

Cosmic Building Block Dust From An Ancient Supernova Found

One of astronomy's big questions is why galaxies forming as recently as 1 billion years after the Big Bang contain so much dust. The leading hypothesis is that supernovae, stars that explode at the end of their lives, contain large amounts of metal-en ...

Article - News Releases - Mar 23 2015 - 11:23am

Wandering Jupiter, Did Our Solar System Once Have Super-Earths?

We may have Jupiter to thank for our unusual solar system.  Before the inner planets we now call  Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars formed, a great inward-and-then-outward journey that Jupiter made early in the solar system's history may have torn apart ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 23 2015 - 3:21pm

Dark Matter- Now With More Darkness

Dark matter is an umbrella term for matter that no one has directly detected but must be out there or physics at the very large scale makes even less sense than it makes now. Since it does not reflect, absorb or emit light, it is invisible, so whatever it ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 26 2015 - 1:31pm