Category Astronomy/Space

This color-coded map shows the strength of surface gravity around Orientale basin on the moon, derived from GRAIL data. (The color scale represents units of “gals” — 1 gal is about 1/1000 of Earth’s surface gravitational acceleration.) Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

New results from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission are providing insights into the huge impacts that dominated the early history of Earth’s moon and other solid worlds, like Earth, Mars, and the satellites of the outer solar system.Researchers examine the origins of the moon’s giant Orientale impact basin. The research helps clarify how the formation of Orientale, approximately 3.8 billion years ago, affected the moon’s geology.

Located along the moon’s southwestern limb – the left-hand edge as seen from...

Scale and Compass for Crab Nebula. Credit: NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI)

The eerie glow of a dead star, which exploded long ago as a supernova, reveals itself in this Hubble image of the Crab Nebula. But don’t be fooled. The ghoulish-looking object still has a pulse. Buried at its center is the star’s tell-tale heart, which beats with rhythmic precision. The “heart” is the crushed core of the exploded star. Called a neutron star, it has about the same mass as the sun but is squeezed into an ultra-dense sphere that is only a few miles across and 100 billion times stronger than steel. The tiny powerhouse is the bright star-like object near the center of the image.

This surviving remnant is a tremendous dynamo, spinning 30X /s...

The Cosmic Horseshoe, as photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Astronomers use observations of gravitationally lensed galaxy to measure properties of early universe. Although the universe started out with a bang it quickly evolved to a relatively cool, dark place. After a few hundred thousand years the lights came back on and scientists are still trying to figure out why. Astronomers know that reionization made the universe transparent by allowing light from distant galaxies to travel almost freely through the cosmos to reach us. However, astronomers don’t fully understand the escape rate of ionizing photons from early galaxies...

Combined ALMA and VLA image of L1448 IRS3B system. Credit: Bill Saxton, ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), NRAO/AUI/NSF

For the first time, astronomers have seen a dusty disk of material around a young star fragmenting into a multiple-star system. Scientists had suspected such a process, caused by gravitational instability, was at work, but new observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) revealed the process in action.

“This new work directly supports the conclusion that there are two mechanisms that produce multiple star systems – fragmentation of circumstellar disks, such as we see here, and fragmentation of the larger cloud of gas and dust from which young stars are formed,” said John Tobin, of the University of Oklahoma and...