Astronomy News

Astrophysicists May Have Found Universe’s ‘Missing Mass’

The main part of this graphic is from the Millenium simulation, which uses supercomputers to formulate how the key components of the Universe, including the WHIM, would have evolved over cosmic time. If these filaments exist, they could absorb certain types of light such as X-rays that pass through them. The inset in this graphic represents some of the X-ray data collected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory from a distant, rapidly-growing supermassive black hole known as a quasar. The plot is a spectrum -- the amount of X-rays over a range of wavelengths -- from a new study of the quasar H1821+643 that is located about 3.4 billion light years from Earth. Image credit: Springel et al / NASA / CXC / CfA / Kovacs et al.
Feb 18, 2019 by News Staff

About a third of the normal matter — meaning hydrogen, helium and other elements — created shortly after the Big Bang is not seen in the present-day Universe. One idea is that this missing mass resides in large-scale filaments in the form of warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM). Using a new technique, an international team of astrophysicists from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Konkoly Observatory and Eotvos University...

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An artist’s impression of Orion Source I, a young, massive star about 1,500 light-years away. The blue region -- about 1/3 the way out from the center of the disk -- represents the region where ALMA detected the millimeter-wavelength ‘glow’ from the salts. Image credit: NRAO / AUI / NSF / S. Dagnello.

ALMA Detects Salts around Young Star

Feb 18, 2019 by News Staff

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have detected the chemical fingerprints of sodium chloride (NaCl), potassium...

Night sky centered on the south Galactic pole in a so-called stereographic projection. In this special projection, the Milky Way curves around the entire image in an arc. The stars in the stream are displayed in red and cover almost the entire southern Galactic hemisphere, thereby crossing many well-known constellations. Image credit: Meingast et al, doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/201834950 / Gaia DR2 skymap.

Astronomers Discover Large Stream of Stars in Solar Neighborhood

Feb 15, 2019 by News Staff

Astronomers using ESA’s Gaia satellite have discovered a large stellar stream that is currently traversing the immediate solar neighborhood at a distance...

Neptune and Uranus. Image credit: NASA / ESA / A. Simon, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / M. Wong & A. Hsu, University of California, Berkeley.

Hubble Spots New Dark Storm on Neptune, Giant Polar Cap on Uranus

Feb 8, 2019 by News Staff

Since its launch into orbit in 1990, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has helped astronomers to amass an album of outer planet images. Yearly monitoring...

This image from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows the Sun. Image credit: NASA / SDO.

Alfven Waves: Solar Magnetic Waves Behave Differently than Previously Thought

Feb 8, 2019 by News Staff

A team of physicists at Northumbria University, UK, has found that magnetic waves in the corona of our Sun — its outermost layer of atmosphere —...

The HII region LHA 120-N 180B resides in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. At only around 160,000 light-years away from the Earth, it is practically on our doorstep. Image credit: ESO / A. McLeod et al.

Astronomers Catch Jet from Fledgling Star in Large Magellanic Cloud

Feb 6, 2019 by News Staff

Deep within LHA 120-N 180B, an HII region located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on ESO’s Very...

An artist’s impression of the protoplanetary disk around the young star V883 Orionis. Image credit: National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

ALMA Detects Complex Organic Molecules around V883 Orionis

Feb 6, 2019 by News Staff

V883 Orionis is a young star located approximately 1,300 light-years away in the constellation Orion. This star is experiencing a so-called FU Orionis...

From a great distance, our Milky Way Galaxy would look like a thin disk of stars that orbits once every few hundred million years around its central region, where hundreds of billions of stars provide the gravitational ‘glue’ to hold it all together. But this pull of gravity is much weaker in the Galaxy’s far outer disk. There, the hydrogen atoms making up most of the Milky Way’s gas disk are no longer confined to a thin plane, instead they give the disk an S-like, or warped, appearance. Image credit: Xiaodian Chen.

New 3D Map of Milky Way Reveals True Shape of Its Stellar Disk

Feb 5, 2019 by News Staff

An international team of astronomers has used 1,339 classical Cepheid stars — pulsating variable stars each up to 100,000 brighter than our Sun —...

This Hubble image shows Messier 85. The image includes infrared, visible and ultraviolet observations from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). Four filters were used to sample various wavelengths. The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / R. O’Connell.

Hubble Space Telescope Spies Messier 85

Feb 4, 2019 by News Staff

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured an amazing new photo of a lenticular — or elliptical — galaxy called Messier 85. This Hubble...

The globular cluster Camargo 1107. Image credit: D. Camargo & D. Minniti, doi: 10.1093/mnrasl/slz010.

Astronomers Discover Three New Globular Clusters in Milky Way

Feb 4, 2019 by Sergio Prostak

A duo of astronomers has spotted three new globular clusters in the Milky Way’s bulge, a 10,000-light-year-wide central structure made primarily of old...

In this illustration, MAXI J1820+070 pulls material off a neighboring star and into an accretion disk; above the disk is a region of subatomic particles called the corona. Image credit: Aurore Simonnet / NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

NICER Observes ‘X-Ray Echoes’ of Nearby Stellar-Mass Black Hole

Feb 1, 2019 by News Staff

Astrophysicists using NASA’s Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) have detected X-rays from a stellar-mass black hole called MAXI J1820+070...

This image, taken with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), shows a part the globular cluster NGC 6752. Behind the bright stars of the cluster a denser collection of faint stars is visible -- the previously unknown dwarf spheroidal galaxy Bedin 1. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Bedin et al.

Bedin 1: New Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy Discovered in Our Cosmic Backyard

Jan 31, 2019 by News Staff

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a new dwarf galaxy in our cosmic neighborhood. Named Bedin 1, the galaxy is approximately...

This illustration helps explain how astronomers tracked the effects of dark energy to about one billion years after the Big Bang by determining the distances to quasars, rapidly growing black holes that shine extremely brightly. Two of the most distant quasars studied are shown in Chandra images in the insets. Image credit: NASA / CXC / M. Weiss; X-rays – NASA / CXC / University of Florence / G. Risaliti & E. Lusso.

Dark Energy May Have Varied over Cosmic Time, New Study Suggests

Jan 31, 2019 by News Staff

Astronomers using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton spacecraft have found evidence that an invisible force called dark...

Pan-STARRS Astronomers Issue Largest Astronomical Data Release Ever

Jan 30, 2019 by News Staff

A team of astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute and the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii has released data from the...

An artist’s impression of the newly-discovered Kuiper Belt object. Image credit: Ko Arimatsu.

Astronomers Discover Kilometer-Sized Object in Kuiper Belt

Jan 29, 2019 by News Staff

A team of astronomers from Japan has discovered a 2.6-km (1.6 mile) wide object in the Kuiper Belt, a distant region of icy debris that extends far beyond...

This striking image combines data gathered with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and data from the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. It shows just a part of the spectacular tail emerging from the spiral galaxy D100. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Cramer et al.

Hubble Finds Spiral Galaxy with Ram Pressure-Stripped Tail in Coma Cluster

Jan 28, 2019 by News Staff

A long streamer of hydrogen gas is being stripped from a spiral galaxy called D100 as it plunges toward the center of the Coma cluster (also known as Abell...

A 30,000 light-year region from the Renaissance Simulation centered on a cluster of young galaxies that generate radiation (white) and metals (green) while heating the surrounding gas. A dark matter halo just outside this heated region forms three supermassive stars (inset) each over 1,000 times the mass of our Sun that will quickly collapse into massive black holes and eventually supermassive black holes over billions of years. Image credit: Advanced Visualization Lab, National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Early Universe’s Massive Black Holes Born in Rapidly-Growing Dark Matter Halos: Study

Jan 28, 2019 by News Staff

When the Universe was less than 1 billion years old, some of its stars turned into supermassive black holes. A key mystery in astronomy has been: why are...

An artist’s impression of an extrasolar submoon. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Can Moons Have Submoons?

Jan 25, 2019 by News Staff

Saturn’s moons Titan and Iapetus, Jupiter’s moon Callisto, Earth’s Moon, and the recently-discovered extrasolar moon Kepler 1625b-i are capable of...

Beyond Neptune, there is a large disk of small objects, called the Kuiper Belt and beyond that is the Oort Cloud, home of the comets. This artwork shows a section of Kuiper Belt, crowded with the icy cores of potential comets. Image credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO.

Massive Disk of Trans-Neptunian Objects Casts Doubt on Planet Nine

Jan 23, 2019 by News Staff

In 2016, Caltech astronomers showed that six distant solar system objects (2007 TG422, 2013 RF98, 2004 VN112, 2012 VP113, 2012 GB174 and a minor planet...

ESO 577-24 was imaged by the FOcal Reducer/low dispersion Spectrograph 2 (FORS2) on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The FORS2 instrument captured the bright, central star, Abell 36, as well as the surrounding planetary nebula. The red and blue portions of this image correspond to optical emission at red and blue wavelengths, respectively. An object much closer to home is also visible in this image -- an asteroid wandering across the field of view has left a faint track below and to the left of the central star. And in the far distance behind the nebula a glittering host of background galaxies can be seen. Image credit: ESO.

Ghostly Planetary Nebula Glows in New VLT Image

Jan 22, 2019 by News Staff

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has released an absolutely beautiful photo taken by its Very Large Telescope (VLT) of a planetary nebula called...

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