Category Astronomy/Space

This series of Hubble Space Telescope images taken over 2 years tracks the demise of a giant dark vortex on the planet Neptune. The oval-shaped spot has shrunk from 3,100 miles across its long axis to 2,300 miles across, over the Hubble observation period. Credit: NASA, ESA, and M.H. Wong and A.I. Hsu (UC Berkeley)

Three billion miles away on the farthest known major planet in our solar system, an ominous, dark storm – once big enough to stretch across the Atlantic Ocean from Boston to Portugal – is shrinking out of existence as seen in pictures of Neptune taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Immense dark storms on Neptune were first discovered in the late 1980s by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft...

The ERG spacecraft observed chorus waves and scattered electrons in the magnetosphere, the origin of pulsation auroras. The scattered electrons precipitated into the atmosphere resulting in auroral illumination. Intermittent occurrence of chorus waves and associated electron scattering lead to auroral pulsation. Credit: 2018 ERG science team.

For the first time, a satellite has directly observed the shower of electrons bouncing across Earth’s magnetosphere, allowing scientists to figure out what causes a rare form of Northern Lights known as pulsating auroras. Typically, the Aurora Borealis is caused by charged particles released from the upper atmosphere of the Sun...

After detecting the first exoplanets in the 1990s it has become clear that planets around other stars are the rule rather than the exception and there are likely hundreds of billions of exoplanets in the Milky Way alone. The search for these planets is now a large field of astronomy. Credit: ESA/Hubble/ESO/M. Kornmesser

An international team analyzing the data from the K2 mission from the Kepler satellite has confirmed the existence of 95 new exoplanets. This brings the total for the K2 mission to almost 300 and the total number of exoplanets known to over 3,600. Kepler was launched in 2009 to study planets that transit in front of their parent stars. It has been an extremely successful mission but a failure in 2013 forced the researchers to change how the craft is operated...

ALMA revealed the rotation of the torus very clearly for the first time. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

High resolution observations show a rotating dusty gas torus around an active supermassive black hole. The existence of such rotating donuts-shape structures was first suggested decades ago, but this is the first time one has been confirmed so clearly. This is an important step in understanding the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies.

Researchers have known for a long time that the more massive the galaxy is, the more massive the central black hole is. This sounds reasonable at first, but host galaxies are 10 billion times bigger than the central black holes; it should be difficult for two objects of such vastly different scales to directly affect each other...