Space

X-rays Provide A New Way To Investigate Exploding Stars

ESA’s X-ray observatory XMM-Newton has revealed a new class of exploding stars – where the X-ray emission ‘lives fast and dies young’. The identification of this particular class of explosions gives astronomers a valuable new constraint to help them model ...

Article - News Staff - May 9 2007 - 9:41am

One Hot Planet

"HD 149026b is simply the most exotic, bizarre planet. It’s pretty small, really dense, and now we find that it’s extremely hot." Using Spitzer, NASA’s infrared space telescope,Joseph Harrington of the University of Central Florida. and his team ...

Article - News Staff - May 9 2007 - 9:53pm

Pyroclastic Activity On Mars

A plateau on Mars known as Home Plate shows evidence of long-past explosive volcanic activity, say scientists on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission. And data collected during the rover Spirit's initial pass across the 90-meter (295 feet) wide ...

Article - News Staff - May 10 2007 - 12:49am

Hyper-accurate Clocks – The Beating Heart Of Galileo

Travellers have relied on accurate timekeeping for navigation since the development of the marine chronometer in the eighteenth century. Galileo, Europe’s twenty-first century navigation system, also relies on clocks – but they are millions of times more a ...

Article - News Staff - May 10 2007 - 11:44am

A Galactic Fossil

How old are the oldest stars" Using ESO's VLT, astronomers recently measured the age of a star located in our Galaxy. The star, a real fossil, is found to be 13.2 billion years old, not very far from the 13.7 billion years age of the Universe. Th ...

Article - News Staff - May 10 2007 - 10:03pm

Hubble Finds Ring Of Dark Matter

Astronomers have long suspected the existence of the invisible substance of dark matter as the source of additional gravity that holds together galaxy clusters. Otherwise, astronomers say, the clusters would fly apart if they relied only on the gravity fro ...

Article - News Staff - May 15 2007 - 12:02pm

NASA Scientists Pioneer Technique For "Weighing" Black Holes

Two astrophysicists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., Nikolai Shaposhnikov and Lev Titarchuk, have successfully tested a new method for determining the masses of black holes. This elegant technique, which Titarchuk first suggested in ...

Article - News Staff - May 16 2007 - 10:24pm

Slicing The Universe With HARP/ACSIS- A New Look At Orion

The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii has a new way to look at the Universe, thanks to two revolutionary instruments called HARP and ACSIS. These instruments operate together, and they recently sliced through the Orion Nebula, rec ...

Article - News Staff - May 18 2007 - 12:17am

Astronomers Detect Two Supermassive Black Holes In Colliding Galaxies

Astronomers have used powerful adaptive optics technology at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawai‘i to reveal the precise locations and environments of a pair of supermassive black holes at the center of an ongoing collision between two galaxies 300 million ...

Article - News Staff - May 18 2007 - 9:06pm

Adaptive Optics Leads The Way To Supermassive Black Holes

Astronomers have discovered the exact location and makeup of a pair of supermassive black holes at the center of a collision of two galaxies more than 300 million light years away. Using adaptive optics (AO), which clear the blurring effects of turbulence ...

Article - News Staff - May 18 2007 - 10:22pm