Space

Discovering The Origin Of Cosmic Rays

Recent observations from NASA and Japanese X-ray observatories have helped clarify one of the long-standing mysteries in astronomy-- the origin of cosmic rays. Outer space is a vast shooting gallery of cosmic rays. Discovered in 1912, cosmic rays are not a ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 9 2007 - 5:34pm

Horizons Fly-By Gives Spectacular View Of Jupiter Lightning

The voyage of NASA’s Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft through the Jupiter system earlier this year provided a bird’s-eye view of a dynamic planet that has changed since the last close-up looks by NASA spacecraft. New Horizons passed Jupiter on Feb. 28, ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 9 2007 - 8:08pm

Lakes And Seas Of Titan's Polar Region

The best views of the hydrocarbon lakes and seas on Saturn's moon Titan taken by the Cassini spacecraft are being released today. A new radar image comprised from seven Titan fly-bys over the last year and a half shows a north pole pitted with giant ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 13 2007 - 1:36am

I Zwicky 18 'Baby' Galaxy Not So Young After All

Observations of I Zwicky 18 at the Palomar Observatory around 40 years ago seemed to show that it was one of the youngest galaxies in the nearby Universe. The studies suggested that the galaxy had erupted with star formation billions of years after its gal ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 16 2007 - 11:16am

M33 X-7: A Massive Black Hole- With An Eclipse

Astronomers have located an exceptionally massive black hole in orbit around a huge companion star. This result has intriguing implications for the evolution and ultimate fate of massive stars. The black hole is part of a binary system in M33, a nearby gal ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 6 2007 - 12:27am

California Wildfire As Seen From Space

Envisat satellite image captures fierce easterly desert winds blowing smoke from wildfires in Southern California. Gale-force winds have fed more than a dozen fires from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border since breaking out on Sunday, killing one person a ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 30 2007 - 2:21pm

Stellar CSI: The Forensics Of The G292.0+1.8 Supernova

Stars die just like people but a spectacular new image shows how complex a star’s afterlife can be. By studying the details of an image made from a long observation by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers can better understand how some stars die a ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 23 2007 - 5:31pm

Dark Matter Dominates Dwarf Galaxies, Say Michigan Astronomers

Stars in dwarf spheroidal galaxies behave in a way that suggests the galaxies are utterly dominated by dark matter, University of Michigan astronomers state. Astronomy professor Mario Mateo and post-doctoral researcher Matthew Walker measured the velocity ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 24 2007 - 7:05pm

Stellar Vampires Unmasked

Astronomers have found possible proofs of stellar vampirism in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae. Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, they found that some hot, bright, and apparently young stars in the cluster present less carbon and oxygen than the major ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 31 2007 - 5:17am

Mild-Mannered MC2 1635+119 Turns Out To Be Super Quasar

New images taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have revealed the wild side of an elliptical galaxy, nearly two billion light-years away, that previously had been considered mild-mannered. The Hubble photos show shells of stars around a bright quasar, ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 25 2007 - 6:41pm