Astronews
Star
A new-born star cloaked in a golden veil stands starkly against the black filament of the Circinus cloud. While it might sound like the beginning of a fantasy novel, this is simply the description of this spectacular Hubble Image The Space Telescope caught a phenomenal view of a young star, IRAS ...
Supermassive Black Holes
The wonderful thing about astronomy is that you might discover amazing things even when you’re not looking for them. This is the case for a team of Australian astronomers who were testing a new radio telescope and stumbled on an incredible finding. The researchers discovered a 3.8 billion solar-m...
Gravitational Waves
Today, in my day job I wrote about the momentous discovery of gravitational waves by LIGO. There are four major discoveries associated with the detection: First of all, today it was announced that on 14th September 2015 gravitational waves were observed by both LIGO detectors. This is the first t...
Astronomy
NASA’s discovery of water on Mars Billions of years ago, Mars looked more welcoming to life than Earth was at the time. We have seen evidence of ancient lakes and river beds, but nowadays water on the surface of Mars exist almost entirely as ice. In 2007, scientists observed some dark lines formi...
AstroNews
The Japanese X-ray satellite SUZAKU has looked at the distribution of gas around the Virgo cluster, a large galaxy cluster close to the Milky Way and the second brightest in X-rays. It discovered that the elements needed to make living organisms, planets and spiced-up stars are equally distribute...
AstroNews
A new paper accepted for publication this month has highlighted how spiral galaxies came to form in the early Universe. By using the power of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a team lead by Roberto Maiolino has individuated the mechanism through which galaxies gather stell...
Exoplanet
In the almost 20 years since the discovery of the first exoplanet orbiting a main-sequence star, we have gone from thinking that planets are a cosmic curiosity to a common feature of the Universe. The race is on to find a true Earth twin, to measure an exoplanet atmosphere or, when the James Webb...
AstroNews
We all get the munchies, but when you’re a supermassive black hole (SMBH) your hunger might have dire consequences. And just like that an SMBH has outgrown its galaxy and jumped to the top of the heavyweight objects in the universe.
AstroNews
As I mentioned in a previous post, there are a few ways to measure the distance of a star in our galaxy. Unfortunately when the Luminosity is unknown and it is too far away to use parallaxes method, we are stumped for ways to estimate the distance.
AstroNews
Pluto, not to be confused with Micky Mouse’s dog, is going to be in the news a lot soon, as we are finally going to take a closer look to the elusive dwarf planet. Pluto Stats: Discovered by Clyde Tombaugh on the 18th of February 1930, it is smaller than our Moon with a 1184 […]
AstroNews
I have a mathematician friend who believes that anything that it is mathematically possible exists somewhere in the multiverse. She believes that there are some features that are so beautiful, that it would be a crime if they were simply quirks of the Universal language.
AstroNews
We were in Wales to catch this partial eclipse of the Sun