Category Astronomy/Space

Two recent models for the formation of the moon, one that allows exchange through a silicate atmosphere (top), and another that creates a more thoroughly mixed sphere of a supercritical fluid (bottom), lead to different predictions for potassium isotope ratios in lunar and terrestrial rocks (right). CREDIT Kun Wang

Measurements of an element in Earth and Moon rocks have just disproved the leading hypotheses for the origin of the Moon. Tiny differences in the segregation of the isotopes of potassium between the Moon and Earth were hidden below the detection limits of analytical techniques until recently. But in 2015, Washington University in St. Louis geochemist Prof...

An image of the giant molecular cloud complex, Mon R2. A far-infrared study of the numbers of dense clumps across this cloud has found statistical correlations that depend on the relative dominance of turbulence versus gravity. Credit: Adam Block, Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter, U. Arizona

Stars form within the dense regions of diffuse molecular clouds, but the physical processes that determine the locations, rate, and efficiency of star formation are poorly understood. Recent thinking envisions a 2-step process: first, a network of dense filaments form due to large-scale turbulence and then fragmentation into cores occurs as gravity starts to dominate...

HIRMES will help researchers determine the location of the raw materials that are the building blocks of life and how their position within the interstellar medium helps planetary systems, like our own solar system, evolve

A team from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has been selected to develop a new, third-generation facility science instrument for the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA. The principal investigator, Samuel Harvey Moseley will lead the team to develop the High Resolution Mid-InfrarEd Spectrometer (HIRMES).

Moseley and his team will construct HIRMES over the next two and one-half years with flights on board SOFIA slated for spring 2019...

This composite image shows RCW 103 and its central source, known officially as 1E 161348-5055 (1E 1613, for short), in three bands of X-ray light detected by Chandra. In this image, the lowest energy X-rays from Chandra are red, the medium band is green, and the highest energy X-rays are blue. The bright blue X-ray source in the middle of RCW 103 is 1E 1613. The X-ray data have been combined with an optical image from the Digitized Sky Survey.

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other X-ray observatories, astronomers have found evidence for what is likely one of the most extreme pulsars, or rotating neutron stars, ever detected...