Category Astronomy/Space

In February 2016 the dwarf nova SS Cyg anomalous outburst lasted for more than 3 weeks. Rapid radio flaring was seen throughout the outburst and the most intriguing behavior was towards the end of the outburst, where a fast, luminous, giant flare, peaking at ~20 mJy and lasting for 15 minutes was observed. This is the first time that such a flare has been observed in SS Cyg. Rapid flares are defined as a sudden,rapid, and intense variation in brightness. Credit: Professor Robert Hynes, University of Louisiana

Incredibly rapid gas flares from a white dwarf binary star system have been detected for the first time by Oxford University scientists. The first sighting of such activity, it suggests that our current understanding of star habits and their capabilities is incomplete...

Backscattered electron images of urban cosmic spherules. Credit: M.J. Genge et al., Geology

More than 100 billion micrometeorites (MMs) fall to Earth each year. Until now, scientists believed that these particles could only be found in the cleanest environments, such as the Antarctic. In their new paper for Geology, M.J. Genge and colleagues show that, contrary to that expectation, micrometeorites can be recovered from city rooftops (eg, primarily in Norway) and that, unlike those from the Antarctic, they are the youngest collected to date.

This is not a new proposition. It has been a popular belief among amateur astronomers that such modern-day extraterrestrial dust can be collected on roofs in urban environments...

The PROCYON spacecraft and comet 67P/Churumov-Gerasiment (Conceptual Image). Credit: NAOJ/ESA/Go Miyazaki

In September 2015, a team of astronomers from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, University of Michigan, Kyoto Sangyo University, Rikkyo University and the University of Tokyo successfully observed the entire hydrogen coma of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, using LAICA telescope onboard the PROCYON spacecraft. They also succeeded in obtaining the absolute rate of water discharge from the comet.

This comet was the target of ESA’s Rosetta mission in 2015. Because the Rosetta spacecraft was actually inside the cometary coma, it couldn’t observe the overall coma structure...

TNT dwarf groups. Three colour images of four of the dwarf groups obtained with the Maryland–Magellan Tunable Filter (MMTF) Fabry Perot (Δλ = 10 Å) for dm1049+09 (top left), dm1349-02 (top right) and dm1623+15 (bottom left), and with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (Δλ = 50 Å) for dm1719+30 (bottom right). Red corresponds to Hα, green corresponds to MMTF or Gemini r-band, and blue corresponds to SDSS g-band. Velocities derived from optical spectroscopy are noted for each group member.

Dwarf galaxies, nuggets of stars and gas 100 to 1,000 times smaller than the Milky Way, are thought to be the building blocks of massive galaxies. Evidence for groups of merging dwarf galaxies, however, has been lacking, until now...