Category Astronomy/Space

The SwRI-led team processed solar coronal images to reveal universal gusts, jets and streams (green) emanating from the Sun, offering a possible explanation for the gusty solar wind found around Earth. The upcoming Parker Solar Probe will fly through this riotous torrent as the first spacecraft ever designed to ‘touch’ the Sun.
Credit: Image Courtesy of NASA/SwRI/STEREO

A SWRI-led team discovered never-before-detected, fine-grained structures in the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona. The team imaged this critical region in detail using sophisticated software techniques and longer exposures from the COR-2 camera on board NASA’s Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory-A (STEREO-A).

The Sun’s outer corona is the source of the solar wind, the stream of charged particles that flow outward fr...

Illustration of Parker Solar Probe circling the Sun.
Credit: NASA/JHUAPL

This summer, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will launch to travel closer to the Sun, deeper into the solar atmosphere, than any mission before it. If Earth was at one end of a yard-stick and the Sun on the other, Parker Solar Probe will make it to within four inches of the solar surface. Inside that part of the solar atmosphere, a region known as the corona, Parker Solar Probe will provide unprecedented observations of what drives the wide range of particles, energy and heat that course through the region – flinging particles outward into the solar system and far past Neptune.

Inside the corona, it’s also, of course, unimaginably hot...

This artist’s illustration depicts the destruction of a young planet, which scientists may have witnessed for the first time. Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

An analysis of X-ray data suggests the first observations of a star swallowing a planet, and may also explain the star’s mysterious dimming. For nearly a century, astronomers have puzzled over the curious variability of young stars residing in the Taurus-Auriga constellation some 450 light years from Earth. One star in particular has drawn astronomers’ attention. Every few decades, the star’s light has faded briefly before brightening again.

In recent years, astronomers have observed the star dimming more frequently, and for longer periods, raising the question: What is repeatedly obscuring the star? The answer, astronomers believe, could sh...

The image of the planet Neptune on the left was obtained during the testing of the Narrow-Field adaptive optics mode of the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The image on the right is a comparable image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Note that the two images were not taken at the same time so do not show identical surface features.

ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has achieved first light with a new adaptive optics mode called laser tomography – and has captured remarkably sharp test images of the planet Neptune and other objects. The MUSE instrument working with the GALACSI adaptive optics module, can now use this new technique to correct for turbulence at different altitudes in the atmosphere...