Category Astronomy/Space

Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo, with SpaceShipTwo attached, takes off from Mojave Air and Space Port in California on an earlier test flight. Credit: Virgin Galactic

Virgin Galactic’s new spaceship has made a successful first glide flight, a key step after a deadly crash of its predecessor two years ago, the spaceflight company said on Saturday. The new SpaceShipTwo, dubbed VSS Unity, was hoisted aloft by carrier airplane WhiteKnightTwo VMS Eve from the Mojave Air & Space Port in California, the company said on Twitter.

Released from the mothership, VSS Unity flew home to Earth on its own, according to the company owned by British billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson. “VSS Unity has landed...

Supercomputer model of a low-mass supernova. Credit: Bernhard Mueller, MNRAS 453, 287-310 (2015)

International research is using new computer models and evidence from meteorites to show that a low-mass supernova triggered the formation of our solar system. The research is published in the most recent issue of leading scientific journal Nature Communications.About 4.6 billion years ago, a cloud of gas and dust that eventually formed our solar system was disturbed. The ensuing gravitational collapse formed the proto-Sun with a surrounding disc where the planets were born. A supernova – a star exploding at the end of its life-cycle –would have enough energy to induce the collapse of such a gas cloud.

“Before this model there was only inconclusive evidence to support this theory,” said Prof Al...

Dan Tamayo is a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Planetary Science at U of T Scarborough. Credit: Photo by Ken Jones

Same class of algorithms used by Google and Netflix can also tell us if distant planetary systems are stable or not. Machine learning is a powerful tool used for a variety of tasks in modern life, from fraud detection and sorting spam in Google, to making movie recommendations on Netflix. Now a team of researchers from the University of Toronto Scarborough has developed a novel approach in using it to determine whether planetary systems are stable or not.

“Machine learning offers a powerful way to tackle a problem in astrophysics, and that’s predicting whether planetary systems are stable,” says Dan Tamayo, U of T Scarborough...

Artist’s conception of the Spiderweb. In this image, the protogalaxies are shown in white and pink, and the blue indicates the location of the carbon monoxide gas in which the protogalaxies are immersed. CREDIT: ESO/M. Kornmesser. This figure is licensed under CC BY 4.0 International License.

Astronomers studying a cluster of still-forming protogalaxies seen as they were more than 10 billion years ago have found that a giant galaxy in the center of the cluster is forming from a surprisingly-dense soup of molecular gas. “This is different from what we see in the nearby Universe, where galaxies in clusters grow by cannibalizing other galaxies...