News of the year

30.12.2009 Herschel Space Observatory sees stars being born

Peering into the heart of a dust-covered stellar nursery, a new infrared observatory has spied some 700 stars in the making. At the moment, the soon-to-be stars are just clumps of dust and gas. But about 100 of the clumps are protostars, embryonic bodies about to initiate nuclear fusion at their cores and become bona fide stars. The other 600 objects are less mature but will ultimately develop into new stars.

Shows: 636

30.12.2009 Space Probe Gets Halfway to Pluto in Record Time

The fastest man-made object ever built, the Pluto-bound New Horizons probe, is now closer to the former planet than Earth, just a little under four years after its launch.

It’s currently traveling at about 31,000 miles an hour and is located about 1.527 billion miles from Earth.

Shows: 584

25.12.2009 Youthful Appearance of Stars Known as Blue Stragglers Explained

For almost 50 years, astronomers have puzzled over the youthful appearance of stars known as blue stragglers.

Blue stragglers are the timeworn Hollywood starlets of the cosmos: They shine brightly, they are older than they appear, and they have, disconcertingly, gained mass at a late stage of life.

Shows: 1169

21.12.2009 Shapes Reveal Supernovae History

At a very early age, children learn how to classify objects according to their shape. Now, new research suggests studying the shape of the aftermath of supernovas may allow astronomers to do the same. Images of supernova remnants taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory shows that the symmetry of the debris from exploded stars, or lack thereof, reveals how the star exploded. This is an important discovery because it shows that the remnants retain information about how the star exploded even though hundreds or thousands of years have passed.

Shows: 617

17.12.2009 Worlds Away: Astronomers Begin to Uncover Nearby "Super-Earths"

A clone of Earth, or even a rough approximation, has proved a difficult thing for scientists to find. The catalogue of planets orbiting other stars grew to more than 400 entries in October, but the goal that drives much of the research into extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, is the discovery of a habitable world, and that goal remains unmet. Some rough approximations, however, are starting to come into view.

Shows: 603

15.12.2009 Black Hole Found to Be Much Closer to Earth Than Previously Thought

An international team of astronomers has accurately measured the distance from Earth to a black hole for the first time. Without needing to rely on mathematical models the astronomers came up with a distance of 7800 light years, much closer than had been assumed until now. The researchers achieved this breakthrough by measuring the radio emissions from the black hole and its associated dying star.

Shows: 666

11.12.2009 Saturn’s Hexagon May Be Solar System’s Coolest Mystery

The Cassini spacecraft has returned the best images yet of the strange hexagonal jet stream that flows around the northern pole of Saturn.

First discovered by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s, the hexagon remains a beautiful mystery to astronomers, and one they’ve been waiting for another shot to see for almost three decades.

Shows: 1347

11.12.2009 Faint Star Orbiting the Big Dipper's Alcor Discovered

Next time you spy the Big Dipper, keep in mind that there is another star, invisible to the unaided eye, contributing to this constellation. According to a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, one of the stars that makes the bend in the ladle's handle, Alcor, has a smaller red dwarf companion.

Shows: 566

09.12.2009 Hubble Takes a New "Deep Field" Image with Wide Field Camera 3

Hubble's latest image is another stunner — and just look at all the galaxies! Hubble has produced a new version of the Ultra Deep Field, this time in near-infrared light and taken with the newly installed Wide Field Camera 3. This is the deepest image yet of the Universe in near-infrared, and so the faintest and reddest objects in the image are likely the oldest galaxies ever identified, and they likely formed only 600–900 million years after the Big Bang. This image was taken in the same region as the visible Ultra Deep Field in 2004, but this new deep view at longer wavelengths provides insights into how galaxies grew in their formative years early in the Universe's history.

Shows: 913

03.12.2009 Star outweighed any known in Milky Way

To make a truly spectacular stellar explosion, you gotta have heft. And according to a motherlode of data on a supernova dubbed SN 2007bi, the exploding star originally tipped the scales at more than 200 times the mass of the sun. That would make the star more massive than any known in the Milky Way.

Shows: 2077

02.12.2009 Quasar Caught Building Future Home Galaxy

The birth of galaxies is quite a complicated affair, and little is known about whether the supermassive black holes at the center of most galaxies formed first, or if the matter in the galaxy accreted first, and formed the black hole later. Observations of the quasar HE0450-2958, which is situated outside of a galaxy, show the quasar aiding a nearby galaxy in the formation of stars. This provides evidence for the idea that supermassive black holes can 'build' their own galaxies.

Shows: 1277

30.11.2009 Fermi Finds Gamma-Ray Microquasar

Fermi's Large Area Telescope has detected bursts of gamma-rays in the binary system Cygnus X-3, which astronomers say are coming from a microquasar. While microquasars have strong emissions across is a broad range of wavelengths, this is the first time this type of object has been detected in gamma rays. "Cygnus X-3 is a genuine microquasar and it's the first for which we can prove high-energy gamma-ray emission," said Stéphane Corbel at Paris Diderot University in France.

Shows: 1422

26.11.2009 Cosmic "Dig" Reveals Vestiges of the Milky Way's Building Blocks

Peering through the thick dust clouds of our galaxy’s "bulge" (the myriads of stars surrounding its centre), and revealing an amazing amount of detail, a team of astronomers has unveiled an unusual mix of stars in the stellar grouping known as Terzan 5. Never observed anywhere in the bulge before, this peculiar "cocktail" of stars suggests that Terzan 5 is in fact one of the bulge's primordial building blocks, most likely the relic of a proto-galaxy that merged with the Milky Way during its very early days.

Shows: 1610

26.11.2009 Eta Carinae - A Naked Eye Enigma

Eta Carinae is a beast of a star. At more than 100 solar masses and 4 million times the luminosity of our Sun, eta Car balances dangerously on the edge of stellar stability and it’s ultimate fate: complete self-destruction as a supernova. Recently, Hubble Space Telescope observations of the central star in the eta Carinae Nebula have raised an alert on eta Car among the professional community. What they discovered was totally unexpected.

Shows: 991

24.11.2009 Spiral Galaxies: Exploring the Baffling Boxy Bulge

When targeting spiral galaxy bulges, astronomers often seek edge-on galaxies, as their bulges are more easily distinguishable from the disc. This exceptionally detailed edge-on view of NGC 4710 taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard Hubble reveals the galaxy's bulge in the brightly coloured centre. The luminous, elongated white plane that runs through the bulge is the galaxy disc. The disc and bulge are surrounded by eerie-looking dust lanes.

Shows: 1782

23.11.2009 Ring of Stars in Centaurus A Uncovered

Centaurus A (NGC 5128) is one of the most studied objects in the Southern sky, because it is the giant elliptical galaxy with the closest proximity to our own Milky Way. It lies 11 million light years away from the Milky Way, and is believe to have merged with another gaseous galaxy about 200 to 700 million years ago. The result of this galactic mashup: the birth of hundreds of thousands of stars in a kiloparsec-spanning ring near the core.

Shows: 1415

20.11.2009 Ticking Stellar Time Bomb Identified

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope and its ability to obtain images as sharp as if taken from space, astronomers have made the first time-lapse movie of a rather unusual shell ejected by a “vampire star”, which in November 2000 underwent an outburst after gulping down part of its companion’s matter. This enabled astronomers to determine the distance and intrinsic brightness of the outbursting object. It appears that this double star system is a prime candidate to be one of the long-sought progenitors of the exploding stars known as Type Ia supernovae, critical for studies of dark energy.

Shows: 1607

20.11.2009 Binary systems share stardust

As the International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009) draws to a close, its organisers must be delighted at the huge attention given over the last 12 months to a field that has come so far since Galileo turned his primitive instrument to the Moon 400 years ago.

Shows: 1116

19.11.2009 Rosetta's new view of crescent Earth

A spectacular photo of a fragile Earth was snapped from space by a visiting probe today. Our home planet appeared as a slim crescent, just like a young Moon, as the European spacecraft Rosetta approached from deep in the solar system. The picture, taken from a distance of 395,000 miles by Rosetta's OSIRIS camera shows the outline of Antarctica and bright spots from sunlight reflected off pack ice.

Shows: 1552