Category Astronomy/Space

Beehive Cluster. Credit: Sven Kohle and Till Credner

Astronomers have detected a new low-mass eclipsing binary star in an open cluster named NGC 2632, better known as the Beehive Cluster (or Praesepe). The newly identified binary, designated PTFEB132.707+19.810, contains two late-type stars much smaller and less massive than the sun.

NGC 2632 is an open star cluster that looks like a hive of bees in the constellation Cancer. Located some 577 light years away, it is one of the nearest open clusters to the solar system. Due to its proximity, this cluster is the target of numerous observations conducted by astronomers searching for new objects, including eclipsing binaries. Such binaries could be very helpful in improving our known theoretical stellar evolution models.

Although PTFEB132...

The geomagnetic field is critical to life on Earth. Without it, charged particles from the sun (the “solar wind”) would blow away the atmosphere, scientists say. Credit: © SkyLine / Fotolia

Scientists have identified patterns in Earth’s magnetic field that evolve on the order of 1,000 years, providing new insight into how the field works and adding a measure of predictability to changes in the field not previously known. The discovery also will allow researchers to study the planet’s past with finer resolution by using this geomagnetic “fingerprint” to compare sediment cores taken from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

The geomagnetic field is critical to life on Earth. Without it, charged particles from the sun (the “solar wind”) would blow away the atmosphere, scientists say...

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 ...