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    Category Astronomy/Space

    NASA’s LADEE Spacecraft finds Neon in Lunar Atmosphere

    August 18, 2015, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artist’s concept of NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft in orbit above the moon. Credit: NASA Ames / Dana Berry

    Artist’s concept of NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft in orbit above the moon. Credit: NASA Ames / Dana Berry

    The presence of neon in the exosphere of the moon has been a subject of speculation since the Apollo missions, but no credible detections were made till now. There’s not enough neon to make the moon visibly glow because the moon’s atmosphere is extremely tenuous, about 100 trillion times less dense than Earth’s atmosphere at sea level. A dense atmosphere like Earth’s is relatively rare in our solar system because an object has to be sufficiently massive to have enough gravity to hold onto it.

    The behavior of a dense atmosphere is driven by collisions between its atoms and molecules...

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    Dark Energy Survey finds 8 more faint celestial objects near our Milky Way Galaxy.

    August 18, 2015, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The Dark Energy Survey has now mapped one-eighth of the full sky (red shaded region) using the Dark Energy Camera on the Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile (foreground). This map has led to the discovery of 17 dwarf galaxy candidates in the past six months (red dots), including eight new candidates announced today. Several of the candidates are in close proximity to the two largest dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, both of which are visible to the unaided eye. By comparison, the new stellar systems are so faint that they are difficult to "see" even in the deep DES images and can be more easily visualized using maps of the stellar density (inset). Fourteen of the dwarf galaxy candidates found in DES data are visible in this particular image. Credit: Illustration: Dark Energy Survey Collaboration

    The Dark Energy Survey has now mapped one-eighth of the full sky (red shaded region) using the Dark Energy Camera on the Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile (foreground). This map has led to the discovery of 17 dwarf galaxy candidates in the past six months (red dots), including eight new candidates announced today. Several of the candidates are in close proximity to the two largest dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, both of which are visible to the unaided eye. By comparison, the new stellar systems are so faint that they are difficult to “see” even in the deep DES images and can be more easily visualized using maps of the stellar density (inset)...

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    Solar Activity is Declining—what to expect?

    August 17, 2015, Categories  Astronomy/Space

     

    Is Earth slowly heading for a new ice age? Looking at the decreasing number of sunspots, it may seem that we are entering a nearly spotless solar cycle which could result in lower temperatures for decades. “The solar cycle is starting to decline. Now we have less active regions visible on the sun’s disk,” Yaireska M. Collado-Vega, a space weather forecaster at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

    Maunder Minimum is also known as the “prolonged sunspot minimum”, which was a period starting in about 1645 and continuing to about 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time.

    Maunder Minimum is also known as the “prolonged sunspot minimum”, which was a period starting in about 1645 and continuing to about 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time.

    But does it really mean a colder climate for our planet in the near future? In 1645, the so-called Maunder Minimum period started, when there were almost no sunspots...

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    Celestial Firework Marks Nearest Galaxy Collision behind the Milky Way

    August 17, 2015, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Dubbed “Kathryn’s Wheel” after the famous firework it resembles and after the wife of the paper’s second author. Such systems are very rare and arise from “bulls-eye” collisions between 2 galaxies of similar mass. Shockwaves from the collision compress reservoirs of gas in each galaxy and trigger the formation of new stars. This creates a spectacular ring of intense emission, and lights up the system like a Catherine wheel firework on bonfire night.

    Galaxies grow through collisions but it is rare to catch one in the process, and extremely rare to see a bull’s-eye collision in progress. Fewer than 20 systems with complete rings are known. This occurred in the constellation of Ara (the Altar).

    Kathryn’s Wheel was discovered during a special wide field survey of the Southern Milky Way undert...

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