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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Giant Meteorite Impacts formed parts of the Moon’s Crust, new evidence shows

    May 12, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    An artist’s impression of how the early Moon was reshaped by an intense period of bombardment. A new study reveals that large impacts could have produced the range of lunar rocks sampled by the Apollo missions over 4.3 billion years ago. Illustration credit: Daniel D. Durda/FIAAA

    New research published today in the journal Nature Astronomy reveals a type of destructive event most often associated with disaster movies and dinosaur extinction may have also contributed to the formation of the Moon’s surface.

    A group of international scientists led by the Royal Ontario Museum has discovered that the formation of ancient rocks on the Moon may be directly linked to large-scale meteorite impacts.

    The scientists conducted new research of a unique rock collected by NASA astronauts dur...

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    Scientists reveal New Insights of Exploding Massive Stars and Future Gravitational Wave Detectors

    May 11, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    A 3D-volume render of a core-collapse supernova. Credit: Bernhard Mueller, Monash University

    In a study recently published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Dr. Jade Powell and Dr. Bernhard Mueller from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) simulated three core-collapse supernovae using supercomputers from across Australia, including the OzSTAR supercomputer at Swinburne University of Technology. The simulation models—which are 39 times, 20 times and 18 times more massive than our sun— revealed new insights into exploding massive stars and the next generation of gravitational-wave detectors.

    Core-collapse supernovae are the explosive deaths of massive stars at the end of their lifetime...

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    Telescopes and spacecraft Join forces to probe deep into Jupiter’s Atmosphere

    May 10, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Credits: NASA, ESA, and M.H. Wong (UC Berkeley) and team

    NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the ground-based Gemini Observatory in Hawaii have teamed up with the Juno spacecraft to probe the mightiest storms in the solar system, taking place more than 500 million miles away on the giant planet Jupiter.

    A team of researchers led by Michael Wong at the University of California, Berkeley, and including Amy Simon of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and Imke de Pater also of UC Berkeley, are combining multiwavelength observations from Hubble and Gemini with close-up views from Juno’s orbit about the monster planet, gaining new insights into turbulent weather on this distant world.

    “We want to know how Jupiter’s atmosphere works,” said Wong...

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    Astronomers find Jupiter-like Cloud Bands on Closest Brown Dwarf

    May 8, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artist’s illustration of the brown dwarf Luhman 16A. Astronomers have inferred the presence of cloud bands on Luhman 16A using a technique called polarimetry, in which polarized light is measured from an astrophysical object much like polarized sunglasses are used to block out glare. This is the first time that polarimetry has been used to measure cloud patterns on a brown dwarf. 
    (Image: © Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC))

    A team of astronomers has discovered that the closest known brown dwarf, Luhman 16A, shows signs of cloud bands similar to those seen on Jupiter and Saturn. This is the first time scientists have used the technique of polarimetry to determine the properties of atmospheric clouds outside of the solar system, or exoclouds.

    Brown dwarfs are objects heavier than planets but ...

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