Surprising Spiral Structure Found Around Red Giant Star
By Annelies Rhemrev
Astronomers have discovered a totally unexpected spiral structure in space. The strange shape, discovered in gas and dust surrounding the red giant star R Sculptoris, was probably created by a hidden companion star orbiting [...]
Anne’s Image of the Day
By Annelies Rhemrev
October 11, 2012
The Ghost Head Nebula, an emission nebula in the LMC
Image Credit: NASA/ESA & Mohammad Heydari-Malayeri (Observatoire de Paris, France)
Click here for a larger image
The Ghost Head Nebula (NGC 2080) [...]
Star- and Planet-Forming Dust in Galaxies Soon After Big Bang
By Annelies Rhemrev
Dust is an annoyance in everyday life, but an important building block of stars and planets. As such, astronomers need to understand how cosmic dust forms over time — it’s an integral step in figuring out the evolution [...]
Huge Amounts of Water Detected at Dawn of Stellar Birth
By Annelies Rhemrev.
ESA’s Herschel space observatory has discovered enough water vapour to fill Earth’s oceans more than 2000 times over in a gas and dust cloud that is on the verge of collapsing into a new Sun-like star.
Herschel’s [...]
Rapidly Growing Giant Black Holes Found
By Annelies Rhemrev
Scientists at the University of Cambridge have used cutting-edge infrared surveys of the sky to discover a new population of enormous, rapidly growing supermassive black holes in the early Universe. The black holes were previously [...]
Our Galaxy is Bigger and has More Dark Matter than Thought
By Annelies Rhemrev.
A research team, led by Associate Professor Mareki Honma from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), has succeeded in precisely determining the astronomical yardstick for the Milky Way galaxy based upon the [...]
A New Black Hole in our Galaxy Discovered
By Annelies Rhemrev
NASA’s Swift satellite recently detected a rising tide of high-energy X-rays from a source toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The outburst, produced by a rare X-ray nova, announced the presence of a previously [...]
Chemistry of Protoplanetary Disks
By Annelies Rhemrev
According to the nebular hypothesis, star formation produces a gaseous protoplanetary disk around it, providing the environment and material for planet formation. Studying these systems can generate information regarding [...]
Surprise: Two Black Holes in One Globular Star Cluster
By Annelies Rhemrev
An unexpected discovery by an international team of astronomers is forcing scientists to rethink their understanding of the environment in globular star clusters, tight-knit collections containing hundreds of thousands of [...]
Nearby Planetary System Hosts Comet Crystals, like Our Solar System Does
By Annelies Rhemrev
Pristine material that matches comets in our own Solar System has been found in a dust belt around the young star Beta Pictoris by ESA’s Herschel space observatory.
Close-up of olivine crystals seen inside a meteorite found [...]
The Universe: Most Accurate And Precise Measurement Of The Expansion Of Space
A team of astronomers, led by Wendy Freedman, director of the Carnegie Observatories, have used NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to make the most accurate and precise measurement yet of the Hubble constant, a fundamental quantity that measures [...]
Galaxy Altering Quasars Ignite As Galaxies Collide
NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes have caught sight of luminous quasars igniting after galaxies collide. Quasars are bright, energetic regions around giant, active black holes in galactic centers.
Credit: NASAThe new observations [...]
The Science Behind those Eye-Popping Northern Lights
By Annelies Rhemrev
Northern night skies have recently been alive with light. Those shimmering curtains get their start about 93 million miles away, on the Sun.
An image of an aurora borealis, and moonrise in the Brooks Range in northern Alaska [...]
Searching for Water on Asteroid
By Annelies Rhemrev
When the Japanese Hayabusa-2 mission is launched towards asteroid 1999 JU 3 in 2014 to collect surface samples, MASCOT – the Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout – an asteroid lander developed by the German Aerospace Center [...]
Egyptian Artificial Toes Are Likely The World’s Oldest Prosthetic Body Parts
The results of scientific tests using replicas of two ancient Egyptian artificial toes, including one that was found on the foot of a mummy, suggest that they’re likely to be the world’s first prosthetic body parts.
University of [...]
Newly Found Comet Could be Brightest Ever Seen
by Annelies Rhemrev
Astronomers are monitoring a newly discovered comet, which is expected to put on a spectacular sky show next year, becoming visible with the unaided eye.
A newly discovered comet called C/2012S1 is expected to be visible [...]
Cosmic Hurricane: Most Powerful Winds In The Universe Found: Giant Mystery Solved
If this were a movie the title might be: Gone, With The Quasar Wind. The most powerful winds in the universe have been found and a gigantic “what done it” mystery has been solved.
The case of the missing quasar gas clouds has been [...]
Geoengineering The Sky Could Turn Earth Into “Lifeless, Ice-Encrusted Rock” Warns Scientist
By Alton Parrish.
Prof. Jost Heintzenberg, Leibniz Institute Leipzig, is warning other scientists they don’t know enough to begin tinkering with Earth’s atmosphere with geoengineering experiments to influence climate change. If [...]
Snow And Ice on Oven-Hot Venus?!
By Annelies Rhemrev
Venus Express has spied a surprisingly cold region high in the planet’s atmosphere that may be frigid enough for carbon dioxide to freeze out as ice or snow.
This image of the Venus southern hemisphere illustrates the [...]
Yellow Supergiant Became a Supernova
By Annelies Rhemrev
A group of researchers led by Melina Bersten (Kavli IPMU) has presented evidence that the yellow supergiant (YSG) star found at the location of supernova SN 2011dh in the famous nearby galaxy M51 (the Whirlpool Galaxy) was [...]