Category Astronomy/Space

Carbon dioxide detection

As Rosetta’s comet approached its most active period last year, the spacecraft spotted CO2 ice – never before seen on a comet – followed by the emergence of 2 unusually large patches of water ice. The CO2 ice layer covered an area comparable to the size of a football pitch, while the two water ice patches were each larger than an Olympic swimming pool and much larger than any signs of water ice previously spotted at the comet.The 3 icy layers were all found in the same region, on the comet’s southern hemisphere.

A combination of the complex shape of the comet, its elongated path around the Sun and the substantial tilt of its spin, seasons are spread unequally between the 2 hemispheres of the double-lobed Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko...

Occator Crater, home of Ceres’ intriguing brightest areas, is prominently featured in this image from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

The brightest area on Ceres stands out amid shadowy, cratered terrain in a dramatic new view from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, taken as it looked off to the side of the dwarf planet. Dawn snapped this image on Oct. 16, from its 5th science orbit, in which the angle of the sun was different from that in previous orbits. Dawn was about 920 miles above Ceres when this image was taken—an altitude the spacecraft had reached in early October.

Occator Crater, with its central bright region and secondary, less-reflective areas, appears quite prominent near the limb, or edge, of Ceres. At 57 miles wide and 2...

The intensity of FRB 150807 at different radio frequencies or colors — red corresponds to lower frequencies and blue to higher frequencies. The x-axis is time. The fine structure in the burst is the scintillation or twinkling–the rays interfere constructively and destructively differently at different frequencies. This pattern provides insights into the turbulence in plasma towards the burst. Credit: Courtesy of V. Ravi/Caltech

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are mysterious flashes of radio waves originating outside our Milky Way galaxy. A team of scientists has now observed the most luminous FRB to date, called FRB 150807...

The star Kepler 11145123 is the roundest natural object ever measured in the universe. Stellar oscillations imply a difference in radius between the equator and the poles of only 3 km. This star is significantly more round than the Sun. © Illustration: Mark A. Garlick

Scientists measure the shape of Kepler 11145123 with unprecedented precision. Stars are not perfect spheres. While they rotate, they become flat due to the centrifugal force. A team of researchers around Laurent Gizon from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and the University of Göttingen has now succeeded in measuring the oblateness of a slowly rotating star with unprecedented precision. The researchers have determined stellar oblateness using asteroseismology – the study of the oscillations of stars...