Category Astronomy/Space

Uranus is seen in this false-color view from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope from August 2003. The brightness of the planet’s faint rings and dark moons has been enhanced for visibility. Image credit: NASA/Erich Karkoschka (Univ. Arizona)

NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Uranus 30 years ago, but researchers are still making discoveries from the data it gathered then. A new study led by University of Idaho researchers suggests there could be two tiny, previously undiscovered moonlets orbiting near two of the planet’s rings. Rob Chancia, a University of Idaho doctoral student, spotted key patterns in the rings while examining decades-old images of Uranus’ icy rings taken by Voyager 2 in 1986...

This artist’s concept depicts “heartbeat stars,” which have been detected by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope and others. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Discovered in large numbers by NASA’s Kepler, heartbeat stars are binary stars that got their name because if you were to map out their brightness over time, the result would look like an electrocardiogram. Scientists are interested in them because they are binary systems in elongated elliptical orbits. This makes them natural laboratories for studying the gravitational effects of stars on each other. In a heartbeat star system, the distance between the two stars varies drastically as they orbit each other. Heartbeat stars can get as close as a few stellar radii to each other, and as far as 10 times that distance during one orbit.

At the point of ...

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter view of Schiaparelli landing site

NASA’s MRO has identified new markings on the surface of Mars that are believed to be related to ESA’s ExoMars Schiaparelli entry, descent and landing technology demonstrator module. Schiaparelli entered the martian atmosphere at 14:42 GMT on 19 October for its 6-minute descent to the surface, but contact was lost shortly before expected touchdown. Data recorded by its mothership, the Trace Gas Orbiter, TGO, are currently being analysed to understand what happened during the descent sequence.

In the meantime, the low-resolution CTX camera on-board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) took pictures of the expected touchdown site in Meridiani Planum on 20 October as part of a planned imaging campaign...

The universe may not be expanding at an accelerating rate, as previously thought, but rather, at a constant rate, suggests new research. (Stock image) Credit: © watoson / Fotolia

5 years ago, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to 3 astronomers for their discovery, in 1990s, that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace. Their conclusions were based on analysis of Type Ia supernovae – the spectacular thermonuclear explosion of dying stars – picked up by the Hubble and large ground-based telescopes. It led to the widespread acceptance of the idea that the universe is dominated by ‘dark energy’ that drives this accelerating expansion.

Now, a team led by Prof Subir Sarkar of Oxford University’s Dept of Physics has cast doubt on this standard cosmological concept...