To understand the significance of the Spitzer Space Telescope in the understanding of our Solar System, think of what the steam engine meant for the industrial revolution. A national team of scientists published in the journal Nature Astronomy two papers that provide an inventory of the major discoveries made possible thanks to the Spitzer Space ...
Another win for Einstein’s theory of general relativity. An international team of researchers led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has measured, with unprecedented accuracy, the gravitational redshift of the Sun, a change in the frequency of the lines in the solar spectrum that is produced when light escapes from the gravitational field ...
At around 60 million light-years from Earth, the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy, NGC 1365, is captured beautifully in this image by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Located in the constellation of Fornax (the Furnace), the blue and fiery orange swirls show us where stars have just formed and the dusty sites of future stellar nurseries. At the outer ...
A growing body of research suggests the planet Venus may have had an Earth-like environment billions of years ago, with water and a thin atmosphere. Yet testing such theories is difficult without geological samples to examine. The solution, according to Yale astronomers Samuel Cabot and Gregory Laughlin, may be closer than anyone realized. Cabot and ...
With the help of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have found six galaxies lying around a supermassive black hole when the Universe was less than a billion years old. This is the first time such a close grouping has been seen so soon after the Big Bang and the finding helps us better understand ...
The vast majority of planets near foreign stars are discovered by astronomers with the help of sophisticated methods. An exoplanet like Beta Pictoris c does not appear in the image, but reveals itself indirectly in the spectrum. A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institutes for Astronomy and Extraterrestrial Physics has now succeeded in ...
When you look up at the night sky at the galaxies, how do you know whether the specks of light that you see are bright and far away, or relatively faint and close by? One way to find out is to compare how much light the object actually emits to how bright it appears. The ...
Catherine Neish is counting the days until her space launch. While the Western planetary geologist isn’t space-suiting up for her own interstellar voyage, she is playing a key role in an international mission — dispatching a robotic drone to Saturn’s moon Titan — set to blast off in 2027. For nearly two decades, the global ...
Astronomers have presented an explanation for the shapes of planetary nebulae. The discovery is based on a set of observations of stellar winds around aging stars. Contrary to common consensus, the team found that stellar winds are not spherical, but have a shape similar to that of planetary nebulae. The team concludes that interaction with ...
An international team of researchers has found that some of the oldest terrain on Venus, known as tesserae, has layering that seems consistent with volcanic activity. The finding could provide insights into the enigmatic planet’s geological history. Tesserae are tectonically deformed regions on the surface of Venus that are often more elevated than the surrounding ...
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