Category Astronomy/Space

An artist’s conception of this unusual system. Credit: Courtesy of Jonathan Holden/Disk Detective

A group of citizen scientists and professional astronomers, including Carnegie’s Jonathan Gagné, joined forces to discover an unusual hunting ground for exoplanets. They found a star surrounded by the oldest known circumstellar disk – a primordial ring of gas and dust that orbits around a young star and from which planets can form as the material collides and aggregates.The team described a newly identified red dwarf star with a warm circumstellar disk, of the kind associated with young planetary systems. Circumstellar disks around red dwarfs like this one are rare to begin with, but this star, called AWI0005x3s, appears to have sustained its disk for an exceptionally long time.

“Most disks o...

Artist’s illustration of a possible ninth planet in our solar system. A recent study has revealed that the unexpected behavior of some Kuiper belt objects could be explained by the presence of a distant, planet-sized object yet undetected in our solar system. Credit: Caltech/Robert Hurt

Planet Nine the undiscovered planet at the edge of the solar system that was predicted by the work of Caltech’s Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown in January 2016 appears to be responsible for the unusual tilt of the Sun, according to a new study. The large and distant planet may be adding a wobble to the solar system, giving the appearance that the Sun is tilted slightly...

Artist impression of the Schiaparelli module after the parachute has been deployed. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab

Essential data from ExoMars Schiaparelli lander sent to its mothership Trace Gas Orbiter, TGO during the module’s descent to the Red Planet’s surface yesterday has been downlinked to Earth and is currently being analysed by experts. Early indications from both the radio signals captured by the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), an experimental telescope array located near Pune, India, and from orbit by ESA’s Mars Express, suggested the module had successfully completed most steps of its 6-minute descent through the martian atmosphere. This included the deceleration through the atmosphere, and the parachute and heat shield deployment, for example.

But the signals recorded by bot...

This image shows atomic hydrogen scattering sunlight in the upper atmosphere of Mars, as seen by the Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph on NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission. About 400,000 observations, taken over the course of four days shortly after the spacecraft entered orbit around Mars, were used to create the image. Hydrogen is produced by the breakdown of water, which was once abundant on Mars’ surface. Because hydrogen has low atomic mass and is weakly bound by gravity, it extends far from the planet (the darkened circle) and can readily escape. Credit: NASA/University of Colorado

The next target for NASA’s New Horizons mission – which made a historic flight past Pluto in July 2015 – apparently bears a colorful resemblance to its famous, main destination...