Category Astronomy/Space

Shockwave of Supernova 1987A as it slammed into debris that ringed the original star before its demise. Credit: Yvette Cendes, Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto

Astronomers have observed the aftermath of Supernova 1987A over a 25-year period, from 1992 to 2017. Since it first appeared in the southern night sky on February 24th 1987, Supernova 1987A has been one of the most studied objects in the history of astronomy.

The supernova was the cataclysmic death of a blue supergiant star, some 168,000 light-years from Earth, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way Galaxy. It was the brightest supernova to appear in our skies since Kepler’s Supernova in 1604 and the first since the invention of the telescope.

The brilliant new star...

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured part of the wondrous Serpens Nebula, lit up by the star HBC 672. This young star casts a striking shadow — nicknamed the Bat Shadow — on the nebula behind it, revealing telltale signs of its otherwise invisible protoplanetary disc.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured part of the wondrous Serpens Nebula, lit up by the star HBC 672. This young star casts a striking shadow – nicknamed the Bat Shadow – on the nebula behind it, revealing telltale signs of its otherwise invisible protoplanetary disc.

The Serpens Nebula, located in the tail of the Serpent (Serpens Cauda) about 1300 light-years away, is a reflection nebula that owes most of its sheen to the light emitted by stars like HBC 672 – young star nestled in its dusty folds...

This is a mosaic image of Mars created from over 100 images taken by Viking Orbiters in the 1970s.
Credit: NASA

A similar process could occur anywhere that igneous rocks are surrounded by brines, including the subsurface oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Mars’ organic carbon may have originated from a series of electrochemical reactions between briny liquids and volcanic minerals, according to new analyses of three Martian meteorites from a team led by Carnegie’s Andrew Steele published in Science Advances.

The group’s analysis of a trio of Martian meteorites that fell to Earth – Tissint, Nakhla, and NWA 1950 – showed that they contain an inventory of organic carbon that is remarkably consistent with the organic carbon compounds detected by the Mars Science Labora...

Payload of the sounding rocket and all those involved in the undertaking, among them scientists of the MAIUS-1 project, employees of the German Aerospace Center, and employees of the Esrange rocket launch site.
Credit: Copyright Thomas Schleuss, DLR

Physicists put in place groundwork for accurately testing Einstein’s equivalence principle. A team of scientists from Germany has succeeded in creating a Bose-Einstein condensate for the first time in space on board a research rocket. On January 23, 2017 at 3:30 a.m. Central European Time, the MAIUS-1 mission was launched into space from the Esrange Space Center in Sweden. After a detailed analysis, the results have been published recently in the journal Nature...