Category Astronomy/Space

Pluto’s informally-named Sputnik Planum region is mapped, with the key indicating a wide variety of units or terrains. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Ever since NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto last year, evidence has been mounting that the dwarf planet may have a liquid ocean beneath its icy shell. Now, by modeling the impact dynamics that created a massive crater on Pluto’s surface, a team of researchers has made a new estimate of how thick that liquid layer might be. The study, led by Brown University geologist Brandon Johnson and published in Geophysical Research Letters, finds a high likelihood that there’s more than 100 km of water beneath Pluto’s surface...

This image, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the colorful “last hurrah” of a star like our sun. Credit: NASA, ESA, and K. Noll (STScI), Acknowledgment: The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

This image by Hubble shows the colorful “last hurrah” of a star like our sun. The star is ending its life by casting off its outer layers of gas, which formed a cocoon around the star’s remaining core. Ultraviolet light from the dying star makes the material glow. The burned-out star ie white dwarf, is the white dot in the center. Our sun will eventually burn out and shroud itself with stellar debris, but not for another 5 billion years.

Our Milky Way Galaxy is littered with these stellar relics, ie planetary nebulae. The objects have nothing to do with planets...

A trove of galaxies, rich in carbon monoxide (indicating star-forming potential) were imaged by ALMA (orange) in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The blue features are galaxies imaged by Hubble. This image is based on the very deep ALMA survey by Manuel Aravena, Fabian Walter and colleagues, covering about one sixth of the full HUDF area. Credit: B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF); ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO); NASA/ESA Hubble

International teams used ALMA to explore the distant corner of the Universe first revealed in the iconic images of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF). These new ALMA observations are significantly deeper and sharper than previous surveys at millimetre wavelengths. They clearly show how the rate of star formation in young galaxies is closely related to their total mass in stars...

This artist’s illustration shows a gas giant planet circling a pair of red dwarf stars. The Saturn-mass planet orbits roughly 300 million miles from the stellar duo. The two red dwarf stars are a mere 7 million miles apart. Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, and a trick of nature, have confirmed the existence of a planet orbiting two stars in the system OGLE-2007-BLG-349, 8,000 light-years away towards the center of our galaxy. The planet orbits ~300 million miles from the stellar duo, about the distance from the asteroid belt to our sun. It completes an orbit around both stars roughly every 7 years. The 2 red dwarf stars are a mere 7 million miles apart, or 14 times the diameter of the moon’s orbit around Earth.

The Hubble observations...