Category Astronomy/Space

Blue Supergiant Stars Open Doors to Concert in Space

A snapshot from a hydrodynamical simulation of the interior of a star three times as heavy as our Sun, which shows waves generated by turbulent core convection and propagating throughout the star’s interior. Darker and lighter colours represent fluctuations due to waves.
© Tamara Rogers (Newcastle University)

Almost all blue supergiants shimmer in brightness because of waves on their surface. Blue supergiants are rock-and-roll: they live fast and die young. This makes them rare and difficult to study. Before space telescopes were invented, few blue supergiants had been observed, so our knowledge of these stars was limited...

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Water found in Samples from Asteroid Itokawa

The samples studied by Jin and Bose came from the feature called the Muses Sea, which is the smooth area in the middle of Itokawa.
Credit: Photo by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)

Up to half of Earth’s ocean water may have come from impacts by asteroids. Two cosmochemists at Arizona State University have made the first-ever measurements of water contained in samples from the surface of an asteroid. The samples came from asteroid Itokawa and were collected by the Japanese space probe Hayabusa.

The team’s findings suggest that impacts early in Earth’s history by similar asteroids could have delivered as much as half of our planet’s ocean water.

“We found the samples we examined were enriched in water compared to the average for inner solar system objects,” says Ziliang J...

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Hubble Spots a Stunning Spiral Galaxy

NGC 2903 is located about 30 million light-years away in the constellation of Leo (the Lion), and was studied as part of a Hubble survey of the central regions of roughly 145 nearby disk galaxies.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Ho et al.

NGC 2903 is located about 30 million light-years away in the constellation of Leo (the Lion), and was studied as part of a Hubble survey of the central regions of roughly 145 nearby disk galaxies. Few of the universe’s residents are as iconic as the spiral galaxy...

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Hubble astronomers assemble Wide View of the Evolving Universe

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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