Category Astronomy/Space

The star cluster Messier 18 and its surroundings. Credit: ESO

The small smattering of bright blue stars in the upper left of this vast new 615 megapixel ESO image is the perfect cosmic laboratory in which to study the life and death of stars. Known as Messier 18 this star cluster contains stars that formed together from the same massive cloud of gas and dust. This image, which also features red clouds of glowing hydrogen and dark filaments of dust, was captured by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile.

Messier 18 was discovered and catalogued in 1764 by Charles Messier during his search for comet-like objects...

These images from the Radar instrument aboard NASA’s Cassini spacecraft show the evolution of a transient feature in the large hydrocarbon sea named Ligeia Mare on Saturn’s moon Titan. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/Cornell

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has found deep, steep-sided canyons on Titan that are flooded with liquid hydrocarbons. The finding represents the first direct evidence of the presence of liquid-filled channels on Titan, as well as the first observation of canyons hundreds of meters deep. Scientists analyzed Cassini data from a close pass the spacecraft made over Titan in May 2013. During the flyby, Cassini’s radar focused on channels that branch out from the large, northern sea Ligeia Mare.

The Cassini observations reveal that the channels – in particular, a network of them na...

The tree-like formations in this molten salt formed under the high-radiation of a transmission electron microscope beam; the jet of ions from the material could serve as a thruster for a nanosatellite Credit: Michigan Tech, Kurt Terhune

Researchers have operated a tiny proposed satellite ion rocket under a microscope to see how it works. The rocket, called an electrospray thruster, is a drop of molten salt. When electricity is applied, it creates a field on the tip of the droplet, until ions begin streaming off the end. The force created by the rocket is less than the weight of a human hair, but in the vacuum of space it is enough to push a small object forward with a constant acceleration...

A Perseid shooting star near the Pleiades over Woodingdean, Sussex, on the early morning of the 13th August, 2013. Credit: Darren Baskill.

Friday, Aug 12, sees the annual maximum of the Perseid meteor shower. This year, as well as the normal peak on the night of Aug. 12-13, meteor scientists are predicting additional enhanced activity in the shower the night before, as Earth passes through a dense clump of cometary debris.

Meteors ( ‘shooting stars’) are the result of small particles, some as small as a grain of sand, entering Earth’s atmosphere at high speed. The parent comet, Swift-Tuttle, which last passed near Earth in 1992, leaves this debris in Earth’s path...