Category Astronomy/Space

This is an image of Apep captured at 8 microns in the thermal infrared with the VISIR camera on the European Southern Observatory’s VLT telescope, Mt Paranal, Chile.
Credit: University of Sydney/European Southern Observatory

Finding raises new questions about ‘star deaths’. An international team of scientists has discovered a new, massive star system – one that also challenges existing theories of how large stars eventually die.

“This system is likely the first of its kind ever discovered in our own galaxy,” says Benjamin Pope, a NASA Sagan fellow at New York University’s Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics and one of the researchers.

Specifically, the scientists detected a gamma-ray burst progenitor system – a type of supernova that blasts out an extremely powerful and narrow jet of ...

Much of Phobos’ surface is covered with strange linear grooves. New research bolsters that idea the boulders blasted free from Stickney crater (the large depression on the right) carved those iconic grooves.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

A new study bolsters the idea that strange grooves crisscrossing the surface of the Martian moon Phobos were made by rolling boulders blasted free from an ancient asteroid impact. The research, published in Planetary and Space Science, uses computer models to simulate the movement of debris from Stickney crater, a huge gash on one end of Phobos’ oblong body. The models show that boulders rolling across the surface in the aftermath of the Stickney impact could have created the puzzling patterns of grooves seen on Phobos today.

“These grooves...

HCG 98 from the deep r image of the IAC Stripe 82 Project (Fliri & Trujillo 2016). The image has been contrast-stretched and is presented here with a logarithmic look-up table to emphasize faint features. Equatorial J2000 coordinates set the scale of this image, which has north to the top and west to the right.

Discovery illuminates how and why galaxies disappear. A team of astronomers from Israel, the United States and Russia has identified a disrupted galaxy resembling a giant tadpole, complete with an elliptical head and a long, straight tail, about 300 million light years away from Earth. The galaxy is 1 million light-years long from end to end, 10 times longer than the Milky Way. “We have found a giant, exceptional relic of a disrupted galaxy,” says Dr...

Jezero crater is a paleolake and potential landing site for NASA’s Mars 2020 rover mission to look for past life. The outlet canyon carved by overflow flooding is visible in the upper right side of the crater. Ancient rivers carved the inlets on the right side of the crater.
Credit: NASA/Tim Goudge

Today, most of the water on Mars is locked away in frozen ice caps. But billions of years ago it flowed freely across the surface, forming rushing rivers that emptied into craters, forming lakes and seas. New research led by The University of Texas at Austin has found evidence that sometimes the lakes would take on so much water that they overflowed and burst from the sides of their basins, creating catastrophic floods that carved canyons very rapidly, perhaps in a matter of weeks.

The findings...