Category Astronomy/Space

Left: Charged particles from the sun (the solar wind) form an induced magnetosphere round Mars, which unlike the sun does not have its own intrinsic magnetic field (artwork: Anastasia Grigoryeva) Larger file Right: Robin Ramstad points out the position of the Swedish instrument ASPERA-3 on a model of the Mars Express spacecraft (photo: Anastasia Grigoryeva)

Despite the absence of a global Earth-like magnetic dipole, the Martian atmosphere is well protected from the effects of the solar wind on ion escape from the planet. New research shows this using measurements from the Swedish particle instrument ASPERA-3 on the Mars Express spacecraft. Present-day Mars is a cold and dry planet with less than 1% of Earth’s atmospheric pressure at the surface...

The Aurora Australis, or Southern Lights, over the South Pole Telescope at NSF’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Credit: Dr. Keith Vanderlinde, NSF

Observations of two galaxies made with ALMA radio telescope suggest that large galaxies formed faster than scientists had previously thought. The two galaxies, first discovered by the South Pole Telescope at NSF’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica, were massive and star-filled at a time when the cosmos was < 1B years old. The observation came as a surprise, considering astronomers had thought that the first galaxies, which formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, were similar to today’s dwarf galaxies – collections of stars much smaller than the Milky Way...

An outburst from V404 Cygni. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Black holes are famous for their muscle: an intense gravitational pull known to gobble up entire stars and launch streams of matter into space at almost the speed of light. It turns out the reality may not live up to the hype. In a paper published today in the journal Science, University of Florida scientists have discovered these tears in the fabric of the universe have significantly weaker magnetic fields than previously thought.j

A 40-mile-wide black hole 8,000 light years from Earth named V404 Cygni yielded the first precise measurements of the magnetic field that surrounds the deepest wells of gravity in the universe...

This simulation shows the turbulent gas when a supernova collides with a nearby star-forming halo. Credit: Ken Chen, East Asian Core Observatories Association

New research bridges scaling gap between astrophysics and cosmology. An international team ran multi-scale, multi-physics 2D and 3D simulations to illustrate how heavy metals expelled from exploding supernovae held the first stars in the universe regulate subsequent star formation and influence the appearance of galaxies in the process. In their respective efforts to understand the universe and all it comprises, there is a telling gap between what cosmologists and astrophysicists study and how they study it: scale...