Category Astronomy/Space

The spectacular planetary nebula NGC 7009, or the Saturn Nebula, emerges from the darkness like a series of oddly-shaped bubbles, lit up in glorious pinks and blues. This colorful image was captured by the powerful MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), as part of a study which mapped the dust inside a planetary nebula for the first time. Credit: ESO/J. Walsh

The spectacular planetary nebula NGC 7009 is ~5000 light years away in the constellation of Aquarius (The Water Bearer). Its name derives from its odd shape, which resembles everyone’s favourite ringed planet seen edge-on. But in fact, planetary nebulae have nothing to do with planets...

Galaxy NGC 1068 can be seen in close-up in this view from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. This active black hole -shown as an illustration in the zoomed-in inset- is one of the most obscured known, as it is surrounded by extremely thick clouds of gas and dust that can be characterized using infrared and X-ray observations. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

New research examines the material that obscures active galactic nuclei obtained from infrared and X-ray observations. Black holes appear to play a fundamental role in how galaxies evolve throughout their life during a phase in which they are active and consume material from the galaxy itself...

The remnant of Tycho’s supernova as seen in X-rays, showing the expanding shock wave. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Rutgers/K.Eriksen et al.; Optical: DSS

An international team of scientists from the Monash University (Melbourne, Australia), the Towson and Pittsburgh Universities (USA) and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, has shed new light on the origins of the famous Tycho’s supernova. The research debunks the common view that Tycho’s supernova originated from a white dwarf, which had been slowly accreting matter from its companion in a binary system.

Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) serve as standard candles of modern observational cosmology; they also play a vital role in galactic chemical evolution. However, the origin of these gigantic cosmic explosions remains uncertain...

IceCube is a neutrino detector composed of 5,160 optical modules embedded in a gigaton of crystal-clear ice a mile beneath the geographic South Pole. PHOTO COURTESY OF NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

For a decade, astronomers have puzzled over fast radio bursts, FRBs, which were first detected in 2007 by astronomers scouring archival data from Australia’s Parkes Telescope, a 64-meter diameter dish best known for its role receiving live televison images from the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. But the antenna’s detection of the first FRB – and the subsequent confirmed discovery of nearly two dozen more powerful radio pulses across the sky by Parkes and other radio telsescopes – has sent astrophysicists scurrying to find more of the objects and to explain them.

“It’s a new class of astronomical ...