Category Astronomy/Space

Swedish and Japanese researchers have, after ten years, found an explanation to the peculiar emission lines seen in one of the brightest supernovae ever observed – SN 2006gy. At the same time they found an explanation for how the supernova arose.

Superluminous supernovae are the most luminous explosions in cosmos. SN 2006gy is one of the most studied such events, but researchers have been uncertain about its origin. Astrophysicists at Stockholm University have, together with Japanese colleagues, now discovered large amounts of iron in the supernova through spectral lines that have never previously been seen either in supernovae or in other astrophysical objects...

The asteroid is named Pallas, after the Greek goddess of wisdom, and was originally discovered in 1802. Pallas is the third largest object in the asteroid belt, and is about one-seventh the size of the moon. For centuries, astronomers have noticed that the asteroid orbits along a significantly tilted track compared with the majority of objects in the asteroid belt, though the reason for its incline remains a mystery.

In a paper published today in Nature Astronomy, researchers reveal detailed images of Pallas, including its heavily cratered surface, for the first time.

The researchers suspect that Pallas’ pummeled s...

The majority of stars in the universe will become luminous enough to blast surrounding asteroids into successively smaller fragments using their light alone, according to a University of Warwick astronomer.

Electromagnetic radiation from stars at the end of their ‘giant branch’ phase – lasting just a few million years before they collapse into white dwarfs – would be strong enough to spin even distant asteroids at high speed until they tear themselves apart again and again. As a result, even our own asteroid belt will be easily pulverized by our Sun billions of years from now.

Illustration of Earth’s magnetospheric bow shock. Satellites both in front of (to the left) and behind the bow shock (to the right) detected telltale magnetic signatures that suggest clouds of space dust were passing them. Credit: NASA

A 40-year-old enigma about ghostly magnetic fields in interplanetary space may have finally been solved by new data from a constellation of 12 satellites in near-Earth space.

New research in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters finds that fine dust from pulverized space rocks is riding the solar wind past the spacecraft, which detected the cloud of fine debris as a temporary change in the local magnetic field.

If the discovery is correct, it points to a new way to study the little-understood intersection between the realms of the ve...