Category Astronomy/Space

Hubble Space Telescope ultraviolet data fills gap in observations. A Southwest Research Institute-led team used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe Jupiter’s moon, Europa, at ultraviolet wavelengths, filling in a “gap” in the various wavelengths used to observe this icy water world. The team’s near-global UV maps show concentrations of sulfur dioxide on Europa’s trailing side.

SwRI will further these studies using the Europa Ultraviolet Spectrograph (Europa-UVS), which will o...

Southwest Research Institute scientists combined data from NASA’s New Horizons mission with novel laboratory experiments and exospheric modeling to reveal the likely composition of the red cap on Pluto’s moon Charon and how it may have formed. This first-ever description of Charon’s dynamic methane atmosphere using new experimental data provides a fascinating glimpse into the origins of this moon’s red spot as described in two recent papers.

University of Arizona astronomers have identified five examples of a new class of stellar system. They’re not quite galaxies and only exist in isolation.

The new stellar systems contain only young, blue stars, which are distributed in an irregular pattern and seem to exist in surprising isolation from any potential parent galaxy.

The stellar systems – which astronomers say appear through a telescope as “blue blobs” and are about the size of tiny dwarf galaxies – are located within the relatively nearby Virgo galaxy cluster...

A University of Arizona-led team of astronomers has created a detailed, 3D image of a dying hypergiant star. The team, led by UArizona researchers Ambesh Singh and Lucy Ziurys, traced the distribution, directions and velocities of a variety of molecules surrounding a red hypergiant star known as VY Canis Majoris.

Their findings, which they presented on June 13 at the 240th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, California, offer insights, at an unprecedented scale, into the processes that accompany the death ...