Space

Europa! Water Plumes On Jupiter's Moon

Astronomers have discovered huge active plumes containing water vapour being released from the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa.  Jupiter's moon Europa has been a focus of extraterrestrial research for some time now as there were clear indicatio ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 13 2013 - 2:47pm

WISE J104915.57-531906.1: Nearby Failed Star System May Harbor A Planet

Astronomers recently took precise measurements of the closest pair of failed stars to the Sun, the binary brown dwarf system WISE J104915.57-531906.1, and the results suggest that the system harbors a third, planetary-mass object. Failed stars are known a ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 16 2013 - 9:07pm

Short-Lived Massive Stars Help Show Milky Way's Two 'Missing' Arms

It's not well known but astronomers actually cannot see what our Galaxy, the Milky Way, really looks like. We are on the inside looking out so scientists instead deduce its shape by observation of its stars and their distances from us.  In the 1950s, ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 17 2013 - 11:24am

Cepheid Variable Gives Us A Spectacular Puppis Show

For most of its life, a star is pretty stable, slowly consuming the fuel at its core to keep it shining brightly, but once most of the hydrogen that stars use as fuel has been consumed, some stars evolve into very different beasts-- pulsating stars. They ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 18 2013 - 9:00am

Neutron Collapses Killed The Radio Star

A new population of exploding stars must 'switch off' their radio transmissions before collapsing into a Black Hole. But they emit one last strong beam of highly energetic radiation, known as a gamma-ray burst, before they die. It was thought al ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 21 2013 - 1:13pm

Blame Volcanoes: Solar Variation Didn't Cause Global Warming- And It Didn't Cause The Lack Of It Either

Solar variation has not strongly influenced climate change, according to a paper which seeks to  overturn a widely held scientific view that lengthy periods of warm and cold weather in the past might have been caused by periodic fluctuations in solar acti ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 22 2013 - 4:57pm

GJ 1214b: Astronomers Characterize Atmosphere Of Exoplanet Super-Earth For The First Time

If you were a weather forecaster for exoplanet GJ 1214b you would have an easy job. Today's forecast: cloudy. Tomorrow: cloudy. Extended outlook: more clouds. Determining the weather on a distant planet around another star hasn't really been pos ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 31 2013 - 11:44am

Fragmentation In The Disk: New Studies Give Boost To Binary Star Formation Theory

Using the new capabilities of the upgraded Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), scientists have discovered previously-unseen binary companions to a pair of very young protostars, which gives strong support for one of the competing explanations for how d ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 31 2013 - 2:50pm

Close, But No E.T. Cigar: KOI-314c Is Earth-Like But Gaseous

Astronomers has discovered the first Earth-mass planet that transits its host star and found that KOI-314c is the lightest planet to have both its mass and physical size measured. Though it weighs the same as Earth, it is 60 percent larger in diameter, me ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 6 2014 - 4:23pm

Blazar B0218+357 Allows For A Gamma-Ray Study Of A Gravitational Lens

Astronomers using NASA's Fermi observatory have made the first-ever gamma-ray measurements of a gravitational lens, thanks to B0218+357, located 4.35 billion light-years from Earth in the direction of a constellation Triangulum.   It's not reall ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 7 2014 - 7:30am