Space

A Jet Of Molecular Hydrogen Arising From A Forming High-mass Star

A team of European astronomers offer new evidence that high-mass stars could form in a similar way to low-mass stars, that is, from accretion of gas and dust through a disk surrounding the forming star. Their article, published in Astronomy & Astrophy ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 7 2007 - 11:11am

Good Gammas Give X-ray Afterglow

Several times a week, astronomers detect the violent death cry of a massive star-- an extraordinarily energetic release of gamma rays that takes place in just a matter of seconds to minutes, called a gamma-ray burst (GRB). The GRB's ejecta, which is ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 8 2007 - 7:58pm

The Leader Of The Celestial "Magnificent Seven"

A decade-long mystery has been solved using data from ESA's X-ray observatory XMM-Newton. The brightest member of the so-called 'magnificent seven' has been found to pulsate with a period of seven seconds. The discovery casts some doubt on ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 9 2007 - 12:17pm

University Of New South Wales- In The Space Science Big Leagues

UNSW space scientists have outshone NASA by scoring a higher academic paper citation rate, according to the latest international ranking of universities and space science institutions. The Thomson group recently reported on the output of refereed journal ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 12 2007 - 9:47am

Bootes Field: New Panorama Reveals More Than A Thousand Black Holes

A new wide-field panorama reveals more than a thousand supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies, some up to several billion times more massive than the sun. This survey, taken in a region of the Bootes constellation, involved 126 separate Chand ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 12 2007 - 12:49pm

Seas On Titan

Instruments on NASA's Cassini spacecraft, part of the joint NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and its moons, have found evidence for seas, likely filled with liquid methane or ethane, in the high northern latitudes of Saturn's moon ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 14 2007 - 11:01pm

Mars Express Radar Gauges Water Quantity Around Mars South Pole

This new estimate comes from mapping the thickness of the dusty ice by the Mars Express radar instrument that has made more than 300 virtual slices through layered deposits covering the pole. The radar sees through icy layers to the lower boundary, which ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 15 2007 - 3:53pm

Robotic Telescope Unravels Mystery Of Cosmic Blasts

Scientists have used the world's largest robotic telescope to make the earliest-ever measurement of the optical polarisation* of a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) just 203 seconds after the start of the cosmic explosion. This finding, which provides new insigh ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 16 2007 - 12:10pm

New Views Of Saturn

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has produced some of the most famous still images in astronomy (e.g., the pillars of creation in the Eagle Nebula). The latest images from HST are movies of Saturn and its moons. Astronomers wrote software that multiplies t ...

Article - Mary Hrovat - Mar 27 2007 - 9:58pm

Fingerprinting The Milky Way

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, an international team of astronomers has shown how to use the chemical composition of stars in clusters to shed light on the formation of our Milky Way. This discovery is a fundamental test for the development of a n ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 22 2007 - 11:19am