Category Astronomy/Space

This illustration shows a glowing stream of material from a star as it is being devoured by a supermassive black hole in a tidal disruption flare. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

When a star passes within a certain distance of a black hole, the stellar material gets stretched and compressed – or “spaghettified” – as the black hole swallows it. A black hole destroying a star, an event astronomers call “stellar tidal disruption,” releases an enormous amount of energy, brightening the surroundings in an event called a flare. In recent years, a few dozen such flares have been discovered, but they are not well understood. Astronomers now have new insights into tidal disruption flares, thanks to data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)...

Visualization of Chariklo and its rings ( left; ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser/Nick Risinger). Visualization of the rings as seen from Chariklo’s surface (right ESO). Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/Nick Risinger (skysurvey.org)

A team of researchers has clarified the origin of the rings recently discovered around 2 minor planets known as centaurs, and their results suggest the existence of rings around other centaurs (minor planets that orbit between Jupiter and Neptune, their current or past orbits crossing those of the giant planets). It is estimated that there are around 44,000 centaurs with diameters >1 km.

Until recently it was thought that the 4 giants such as Saturn and Jupiter were the only ringed celestial bodies within our solar system...

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft captured this high-resolution, enhanced color view of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, just before closest approach on July 14, 2015. The image combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the spacecraft’s Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC); the colors are processed to best highlight the variation of surface properties across Charon. Scientists have learned that reddish material in the north (top) polar region — informally named Mordor Macula — is chemically processed methane that escaped from Pluto’s atmosphere onto Charon. Charon is 754 miles (1,214 kilometers) across; this image resolves details as small as 1.8 miles (2.9 kilometers). Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

In June 2015, when the cameras on NASA’s approaching New Horizons spacecraft first s...

A rendering of the Cislunar Explorers CubeSat separating after deployment. Credit: Kyle Doyle

Cislunar Explorers, a team of Cornell University students guided by Mason Peck, a former senior official at NASA and associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, is attempting to boldly go where no CubeSat team has gone before: around the moon. Not only is Peck’s group attempting to make a first-ever moon orbit with a satellite no bigger than a cereal box, made entirely with off-the-shelf materials, it’s doing so with propellant that you can obtain simply by turning on a faucet. “This has a very important goal, and that is to demonstrate that you can use water as a propellant,” said Peck, who served as NASA’s chief technologist in 2012-13.

The Cislunar Explorers – cislunar means “b...