Category Astronomy/Space

This composite image shows suspected plumes of water vapor erupting at the 7 o’clock position off the limb of Jupiter’s moon Europa. The plumes, photographed by NASA’s Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, were seen in silhouette as the moon passed in front of Jupiter. Hubble’s ultraviolet sensitivity allowed for the features — rising over 100 miles (160 kilometers) above Europa’s icy surface — to be discerned. The water is believed to come from a subsurface ocean on Europa. The Hubble data were taken on January 26, 2014. The image of Europa, superimposed on the Hubble data, is assembled from data from the Galileo and Voyager missions. Credit: NASA/ESA/W. Sparks (STScI)/USGS Astrogeology Science Center

This finding bolsters other Hubble observations suggesting the icy moon erupts ...

Artist’s conception. Credit: courtesy of Robin Dienel

When a star is young, it is often still surrounded by a primordial rotating disk of gas and dust, from which planets can form. Astronomers like to find such disks because they might be able to catch the star partway through the planet formation process, but it’s highly unusual to find such disks around brown dwarfs or stars with very low masses. New work from a team led by Anne Boucher of Université de Montréal, and including Carnegie’s Jonathan Gagné and Jacqueline Faherty, has discovered 4 new low-mass objects surrounded by disks.

3 of 4 objects discovered by these researchers are quite small, somewhere between only 13 and 18 times the mass of Jupiter. The fourth has about 120 times Jupiter’s mass...

NASA-funded researchers sent a sounding rocket through the sun’s dense helium wake, called the helium-focusing cone, to understand the origin of certain X-rays in space. (Conceptual graphic not to scale.) Credit: NASA Goddard’s Conceptual Image Lab/Lisa Poje

In the last century, humans realized that space is filled with types of light we can’t see – from infrared signals released by hot stars and galaxies, to the cosmic microwave background that comes from every corner of the universe. Some of this invisible light that fills space takes the form of Xrays, the source of which has been hotly contended over the past few decades.

It wasn’t until the flight of the DXL sounding rocket, short for Diffuse X-ray emission from the Local galaxy, that scientists had concrete answers about the X-ra...

Background subtracted pulsed fractions of the 0.42 s signal as a function of energy for the 2013 (black circles) and 2014 (red squares) pn data. Credit: Israel et al., 2016.

A team of European astronomers has discovered a new pulsar in a variable ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX) known as NGC 7793 P13. The newly found object is the third ultraluminous X-ray pulsar detected so far, and also the fastest-spinning one. ULXs are point sources in the sky that are so bright in X-rays that each emits more radiation than a million suns emit at all wavelengths. Although they are less luminous than active galactic nuclei, they are more consistently luminous than any known stellar process.

NGC 7793 P13 (also known as XMMU J235751...