Category Astronomy/Space

This is an artist’s impression based on published scientific data on the HR 8799 solar system. The magenta, HR 8799c planet is in the foreground. Compared to Jupiter, this gas giant is about seven times more massive and has a radius that is 20 percent larger. HR 8799c’s planetary companions, d and b are in the background, orbiting their host star. Credit: W. M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko/C. Alvarez

Researchers are perfecting technology to one day look for signs of alien life. Astronomers have gleaned some of the best data yet on the composition of a planet known as HR 8799c – a young giant gas planet about 7 times the mass of Jupiter that orbits its star every 200 years.

The team used state-of-the art instrumentation at the W. M...

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...