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    Category Astronomy/Space

    NASA Telescopes take a close look at the Brightest Comet of 2018

    December 23, 2018, Categories  Astronomy/Space


    NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope photographed comet 46P/Wirtanen on Dec. 13, when the comet was 7.4 million miles (12 million kilometers) from Earth. In this visible light image, the comet’s nucleus is hidden in the center of a fuzzy glow from the comet’s coma. The coma is a cloud of gas and dust that the comet has ejected during its pass through the inner solar system due to heating from the Sun. To make this composite image, the color blue was applied to high-resolution grayscale exposures acquired from the spacecraft’s WFC3 instrument.
    Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Bodewits (Auburn University), and J.-Y. Li (Planetary Science Institute)

    As the brilliant comet 46P/Wirtanen streaked across the sky, NASA telescopes caught it on camera from multiple angles...

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    Baby Star’s Fiery Tantrum could create the Building Blocks of Planets

    December 22, 2018, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artist’s impression of a similar solar flare (a very large flare from EV Lac) available via the NASA website, use only with Image
    Credit: Casey Reed/NASA

    A massive stellar flare on a baby star has been spotted by University of Warwick astronomers, shedding light on the origins of potentially habitable exoplanets. One of the largest ever seen on a star of its type, the huge explosion of energy and plasma is around 10,000 times bigger than the largest solar flare ever recorded from our own Sun.

    The discovery is detailed in a paper for the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and reveals how this huge ‘tantrum’ could even perturb the material orbiting a star which would create the building blocks for future planets...

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    Sapphires and Rubies in the Sky

    December 20, 2018, Categories  Astronomy/Space


    Illustration of one of the exotic super-Earth candidates, 55 Cnc e, which are rich in sapphires and rubies and might shimmer in blue and red colors.
    Credit: Illustration Thibaut Roger

    Researchers have discovered a new, exotic class of planets outside our solar system. These so-called super-Earths were formed at high temperatures close to their host star and contain high quantities of calcium, aluminium and their oxides – including sapphire and ruby.

    21 light years away from us in the constellation Cassiopeia, a planet orbits its star with a year that is just three days long. Its name is HD219134 b. With a mass almost five times that of Earth it is a so-called “super-Earth...

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    Fossil from the Big Bang discovered with W. M. Keck Observatory

    December 20, 2018, Categories  Astronomy/Space


    Within the gas in the (blue) filaments connecting the (orange) galaxies lurk rare pockets of pristine gas — vestiges of the Big Bang that have somehow been orphaned from the explosive, polluting deaths of stars, seen here as circular shock waves around some orange points.
    Credit: TNG COLLABORATION

    Rare relic is one of only three fossil clouds known in the universe. A relic cloud of gas, orphaned after the Big Bang, has been discovered in the distant universe by astronomers using the world’s most powerful optical telescope, the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii.

    The discovery of such a rare fossil, led by PhD student Fred Robert and Professor Michael Murphy at Swinburne University of Technology, offers new information about how the first galaxies in the universe formed...

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