Category Astronomy/Space

This artist’s impression shows the spiral galaxy NGC 4921 based on observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: ICRAR, NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team. STScI/AURA

It’s the big astrophysical whodunnit. Across the Universe, galaxies are being killed and the question scientists want answered is, what’s killing them? New research published today by a global team of researchers, based at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), seeks to answer that question. The study reveals that ram-pressure stripping is more prevalent than previously thought, driving gas from galaxies and sending them to an early death by depriving them of the material to make new stars.

The study of 11,000 galaxies shows their gas – the lifeblood for star formation – is being violently ...

An artist’s representation of what the three unusual tails of the pulsar Geminga may look like close up. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory is giving astronomers a better look at pulsars and their associated pulsar wind nebulae, enabling new constraints on the geometry of pulsars and why they look the way they do from Earth. Credit: Nahks Tr’Ehnl

Like cosmic lighthouses sweeping the universe with bursts of energy, pulsars have fascinated and baffled astronomers since they were first discovered 50 years ago. In 2 studies, international teams suggest that recent images from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory of 2 pulsars – Geminga and B0355+54 – may help shine a light on the distinctive emission signatures of pulsars, as well as their often perplexing geometry.

Pulsars are a type of neutron star...

This image of the entire Sun was taken in the red visible light emitted by iron atoms in the Sun’s atmosphere. Light at this wavelength originates from the visible solar surface, the photosphere. A cooler, darker sunspot is clearly visible in the disc, and as a visual comparison is shown alongside the image from ALMA at a wavelength of 1.25 millimetres. The full-disc solar image was taken with the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), NASA.

New images taken with the ALMA in Chile have revealed otherwise invisible details of our Sun, including a new view of the dark, contorted centre of a sunspot that is nearly twice the diameter of the Earth...

Rolf Chini has been researching approximately 400 stars in the vicinity of the sun that share some of the sun’s properties for many years. In the process, he and his team have made a very interesting discovery. Credit: © RUB, Nelle

49 Lib, a relatively bright star in the southern sky, is 12 billion years old rather than just 2.3 billion. For many decades, researchers were stumped by conflicting data pertaining to this celestial body, because they had estimated it as much younger than it really is. Determining its age anew, astronomers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have now resolved all inconsistencies. “It had previously been assumed that the star was only half as old as our sun,” says Chini. “However, our data have shown that it had been formed at the time that our galaxy was born...