Category Astronomy/Space

A comparison of visualizing galaxies with and without ZFOURGE. Credit: Texas A&M University

An international team of astronomers, including Carnegie’s Eric Persson, has charted the rise and fall of galaxies over 90% of cosmic history. FourStar Galaxy Evolution Survey (ZFOURGE) has built a multicolored photo album of galaxies as they grow from their faint beginnings into mature and majestic giants. They did so by measuring distances and brightnesses for more than 70,000 galaxies spanning more than 12 billion years of cosmic time, revealing the breadth of galactic diversity.

The team assembled the colorful photo album by using a new set of filters that are sensitive to infrared light and taking images with them with the FourStar camera at Carnegie’s 6...

In this spacecraft image of Phobos, red arrows indicate a chain of small craters whose origin researchers were able to trace back to a primary impact at the large crater known as Grildrig. Credit: ESA/Mars Express, modified by Nayak & Asphaug; copyrighted image

Some of the mysterious grooves on Mars’ moon Phobos are the result of debris ejected by impacts eventually falling back onto the surface to form linear chains of craters, according to a new study. One set of grooves on Phobos are thought to be stress fractures resulting from the tidal pull of Mars. The new study addresses another set of grooves that do not fit that explanation. “These grooves cut across the tidal fields, so they require another mechanism...

Dimitri Veras. The fates of Solar system analogues with one additional distant planet, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2016). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stw2170

The solar system could be thrown into disaster when the sun dies if the mysterious ‘Planet Nine’ exists, according to research from the University of Warwick. Dr Dimitri Veras in the Department of Physics has discovered that the presence of Planet Nine – the hypothetical planet which may exist in the outer Solar System – could cause the elimination of at least one of the giant planets after the sun dies, hurling them out into interstellar space through a sort of ‘pinball’ effect...

The RATAN-600 radio telescope. Credit: nat-geo.ru

A star system 94 light years away is in the spotlight as a possible candidate for intelligent inhabitants, thanks to the discovery of a radio signal by a group of Russian astronomers. HD 164595, a solar system a few billion years older than the Sun but centered on a star of comparable size and brightness, is the purported source of a signal found with the RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya, at the northern foot of the Caucasus Mountains. This system is known to have one planet, a Neptune-sized world in such a very tight orbit, making it unattractive for life. However, there could be other planets in this system that are still undiscovered.

Could it be a transmission from a technically proficient society? At this point, we can only ...