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    Category Astronomy/Space

    How to make ‘your own supernova’

    July 9, 2017, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Image credit: Shutterstock

    How to make a supernova – Summer Science Exhibition 2017

    Researchers are using the largest, most intense lasers on the planet, to for the first time, show the general public how to recreate the effects of supernovae, in a laboratory. One of the most extreme astrophysical events, Supernova explosions are the violent deaths of certain stars that scatter elements heavier than hydrogen and helium into surrounding space. Our own solar system is thought to have formed when a nearby supernova exploded distributing these elements into a cloud of hydrogen that then condensed to form our sun and the planets. In fact, the very atoms that make up our bodies were formed in the remnants of such an explosion.
     
    Working in collaboration with Imperial College, London, and AWE Aldermaston the tea...
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    First Discovery of an exoplanet with SPHERE/VLT

    July 8, 2017, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Picture taken by SPHERE, showing the planet made visible after the star has been hidden by the coronograph (A). Credit: © UNIGE

    Picture taken by SPHERE, showing the planet made visible after the star has been hidden by the coronograph (A).
    Credit: © UNIGE

    An international team, including members of the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, discovered an exoplanet by direct imaging using SPHERE, an instrument designed and developed by a consortium of 12 European institutes on the Very Large Telescope VLT ESO, based in Chile. The instrument, which corrects in real time the terrestrial atmospheric turbulences and occults the light of the star, allows to take a real “photography” of the exoplanet. While more than 3600 exoplanets were discovered through indirect methods, only a handful of them could be observed by direct imaging.

    In order to take this kind of image, SPHERE is equipped with a deformable mirror that ...

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    Cosmic barbecue: Researchers spot 60 new ‘hot Jupiter’ candidates

    July 8, 2017, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The diagram above shows a hot Jupiter at various phases of its orbit. The sizes of the star and planet and the separations between them are to scale for a typical hot Jupiter. The amount of reflected starlight that is observed depends on the planet's position within its orbit and the inclination of the orbit with respect to the observer.

    The diagram above shows a hot Jupiter at various phases of its orbit. The sizes of the star and planet and the separations between them are to scale for a typical hot Jupiter. The amount of reflected starlight that is observed depends on the planet’s position within its orbit and the inclination of the orbit with respect to the observer.

     
    Yale researchers have identified 60 potential new “hot Jupiters” — highly irradiated worlds that glow like coals on a barbecue grill and are found orbiting only 1% of Sun-like stars. Hot Jupiters constitute a class of gas giant planets located so close to their parent stars that they take less than a week to complete an orbit. Second-year Ph.D...
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    First look at Gravitational Dance that drives Stellar Formation

    July 7, 2017, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Left: three color composite image of SDC13 where red, green and blue bands correspond to 70?m HIGAL (Molinari et al. 2010), 24?m Spitzer MIPSGAL (Carey et al. 2009) and 8?m Spitzer GLIMPSE (Churchwell et al. 2009) maps respectively. The four dark, filamentary arms are clearly visible. Right: Brand new, high resolution map of SDC13 tracing the internal dense ammonia gas revealing cores dotted along all the filaments. Credit: G. Williams et al. / University of Cardiff

    Left: three color composite image of SDC13 where red, green and blue bands correspond to 70?m HIGAL (Molinari et al. 2010), 24?m Spitzer MIPSGAL (Carey et al. 2009) and 8?m Spitzer GLIMPSE (Churchwell et al. 2009) maps respectively. The four dark, filamentary arms are clearly visible. Right: Brand new, high resolution map of SDC13 tracing the internal dense ammonia gas revealing cores dotted along all the filaments. Credit: G. Williams et al. / University of Cardiff

    Swirling motions in clouds of cold, dense gas have given, for the first time, an active insight into how gravity creates the compact cores from which stars form in the interstellar medium...

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