Category Astronomy/Space

This image, in which you can view NGC 362’s individual stars, was taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). Text credit: European Space Agency Image credit: ESA/Hubble& NASA

Globular clusters offer some of the most spectacular sights in the night sky. These ornate spheres contain hundreds of thousands of stars, and reside in the outskirts of galaxies. The Milky Way contains over 150 such clusters — and the one shown in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image, named NGC 362, is one of the more unusual ones.

As stars make their way through life they fuse elements together in their cores, creating heavier and heavier elements — known in astronomy as metals — in the process...

Final sequence of images of Asteroid Lutetia, acquired on 10 July 2010 by ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft just before making closest approach of 3162 km. Lutetia is an elongated body, with its longest side around 130 km. ~ESA 2010 MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

The international effort to find, confirm and catalogue the multitude of asteroids that pose a threat to our planet has reached a milestone: 15 000 discovered – with many more to go.The number of catalogued asteroids approaching Earth has grown rapidly since the count reached 10 000 only 3 years ago. Near-Earth objects, or NEOs, are asteroids or comets with sizes ranging from metres to tens of kilometres whose orbits come close to ours, ie they could hit our planet.

The discovered NEOs are part of a much lar...

This artist’s concept illustrates how the most extreme “pumpkin star” found by Kepler and Swift compares with the sun. Both stars are shown to scale. KSw 71 is larger, cooler and redder than the sun and rotates four times faster. Rapid spin causes the star to flatten into a pumpkin shape, which results in brighter poles and a darker equator. Rapid rotation also drives increased levels of stellar activity such as starspots, flares and prominences, producing X-ray emission over 4,000 times more intense than the peak emission from the sun. KSw 71 is thought to have recently formed following the merger of two sun-like stars in a close binary system. Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Francis Reddy

Astronomers using observations from NASA’s Kepler and Swift missions have discovered a b...

3-D printed early universe. Credit: Image courtesy of Imperial College London

Researchers have created a 3D printed cosmic microwave background – a map of the oldest light in the universe — and provided the files for download. The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a glow that the universe has in the microwave range that maps the oldest light in the universe. It was imprinted when the universe first became transparent, instead of an opaque fog of plasma and radiation. The CMB formed when the universe was only 380,000 years old – very early on in its 13.8 billion-year history.

The Planck satellite is making ever-more detailed maps of the CMB, which tells astronomers more about the early universe and the formation of structures within it, such as galaxies...