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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Blast from the Past

    November 25, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The enigmatic CK Vulpeculae nebula. The team of astronomers measured the speeds and changes in positions of the two small reddish arcs about 1/4 of the way up from the bottom and 1/4 of the way down from the top to help determine that the nebula is expanding five times faster than previously thought.

    Credit:International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA
    Image processing: Travis Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage), Jen Miller (Gemini Observatory/NSF’s NOIRLab), Mahdi Zamani & Davide de Martin

    Gemini North observations enable breakthrough in centuries-old effort to unravel astronomical mystery...

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    Milky Way Family Tree

    November 24, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Family tree of the Milky Way. The main progenitor of the Milky Way is denoted by the trunk of the tree, coloured by stellar mass. Black lines indicate the five identified galaxies. Grey dotted lines depict other mergers that the Milky Way experienced that could not be connected to a specific progenitor. From left to right, the six images along the top of the figure indicate the identified progenitor galaxies: Sagittarius, Sequoia, Kraken, the Milky Way’s Main progenitor, the progenitor of the Helmi streams, and Gaia-Enceladus-Sausage. | © D. Kruijssen

    Astrophysicists reconstruct the galaxy merger history of our home galaxy. Galaxies like the Milky Way formed by the merging of smaller progenitor galaxies...

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    Astronomers discover New ‘Fossil Galaxy’ Buried Deep within the Milky Way

    November 23, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    An all-sky image of the stars in the Milky Way as seen from Earth. The coloured rings show the approximate extent of the stars that came from the fossil galaxy known as Heracles. Credit: Danny Horta-Darrington (LJMU), ESA/Gaia, SDSS

    Scientists working with data from the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys’ Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) have discovered a “fossil galaxy” hidden in the depths of our own Milky Way. This result, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, may shake up our understanding of how the Milky Way grew into the galaxy we see today.

    The proposed fossil galaxy may have collided with the Milky Way ten billion years ago, when our galaxy was still in its infancy...

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    Field Geology at Mars’ Equator Points to Ancient Megaflood

    November 22, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Mars environment
    This composite, false-color image of Mount Sharp inside Gale crater on Mars shows geologists a changing planetary environment. On Mars, the sky is not blue, but the image was made to resemble Earth so that scientists could distinguish stratification layers.

    Floods of unimaginable magnitude once washed through Gale Crater on Mars’ equator around 4 billion years ago — a finding that hints at the possibility that life may have existed there, according to data collected by NASA’s Curiosity rover and analyzed in joint project by scientists from Jackson State University, Cornell University, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Hawaii.

    The research, “Deposits from Giant Floods in Gale Crater and Their Implications for the Climate of Early Mars,” was published Nov...

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