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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Hubble astronomers assemble Wide View of the Evolving Universe

    May 4, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    apparent size comparison of Legacy Field mosaic with full Moon
    This graphic compares the dimensions of the Hubble Legacy Field on the sky with the angular size of the Moon. The Hubble Legacy Field is one of the widest views ever taken of the universe with Hubble. The new portrait, a mosaic of nearly 7,500 exposures, covers almost the width of the full Moon. The Moon and the Legacy Field each subtend about an angle of one-half a degree on the sky (or half the width of your forefinger held at arm’s length).
    Credits: Hubble Legacy Field Image: NASA, ESA, and G. Illingworth and D. Magee (University of California, Santa Cruz); Moon Image: NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center and Arizona State University


    Astronomers have put together the largest and most comprehensive “history book” of galaxies into one single image, using 16 years’ worth of observations ...

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    Magma is the key to the Moon’s Makeup

    May 3, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Snapshots of numerical modeling of the moon’s formation by a giant impact. The central part of the image is a proto-Earth; red points indicate materials from the ocean of magma in a proto-Earth; blue points indicate the impactor materials.
    Credit: Hosono, Karato, Makino, and Saitoh

    For more than a century, scientists have squabbled over how Earth’s moon formed. But researchers at Yale and in Japan say they may have the answer.

    Many theorists believe a Mars-sized object slammed into the early Earth, and material dislodged from that collision formed the basis of the moon. When this idea was tested in computer simulations, it turned out that the moon would be made primarily from the impacting object...

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    What a Dying Star’s Ashes tell us about the Birth of our Solar System

    May 2, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Billions of years ago, before our solar system was born, a dead star known as a white dwarf in a nearby binary star system accumulated enough material from its companion to cause it to ‘go nova.’ The stellar explosion forged dust grains with exotic compositions not found in our solar system. A team of researchers led by the UA found such a grain (inset image), encased in a meteorite, that survived the formation of our solar system and analyzed it with instruments sensitive enough to ID single atoms in a sample. Measuring one 25,000th of an inch, the carbon-rich graphite grain (red) revealed an embedded speck of oxygen-rich material (blue), two types of stardust that were thought could not form in the same nova eruption.
    Credit: University of Arizona/Heather Roper

    Researchers discovere...

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    Spinning Black Hole Sprays Light-Speed Plasma Clouds into Space

    April 30, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artist’s impression of jet ejections in V404 Cygni. With our radio telescopes, we see individual bright clouds of plasma that have been ejected from the innermost regions, and redirected by the puffed-up inner accretion disk.
    Credit: ICRAR

    Astronomers have discovered rapidly swinging jets coming from a black hole almost 8000 light-years from Earth. The research shows jets from V404 Cygni’s black hole behaving in a way never seen before on such short timescales. The jets appear to be rapidly rotating with high-speed clouds of plasma – potentially just minutes apart – shooting out of the black hole in different directions.

    Lead author Associate Professor James Miller-Jones, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), said black ho...

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