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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Mars rover Curiosity views spectacular layered Rock Formations

    September 10, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Mars rover Curiosity views spectacular layered rock formations

    This view from the Mast Camera (Mastcam) in NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover shows an outcrop with finely layered rocks within the “Murray Buttes” region on lower Mount Sharp. The buttes and mesas rising above the surface in this area are eroded remnants of ancient sandstone that originated when winds deposited sand after lower Mount Sharp had formed. Curiosity closely examined that layer — called the “Stimson formation” — during the first half of 2016, while crossing a feature called “Naukluft Plateau” between two exposures of the Murray formation. The layering within the sandstone is called “cross-bedding” and indicates that the sandstone was deposited by wind as migrating sand dunes. The image was taken on Sept. 8, 2016, during the 1454th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity’s work on Mars...

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    September 10, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Rosetta’s last week at the comet

    Rosetta’s last week at the comet

    Squeezing out unique scientific observations until the very end, Rosetta’s thrilling mission will culminate with a descent on 30 September towards a region of active pits on the comet’s ‘head’. The region, known as Ma’at, lies on the smaller of the 2 lobes of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. It is home to several active pits more than 100 m in diameter and 50–60 m in depth – where a number of the comet’s dust jets originate. The walls of the pits also exhibit intriguing metre-sized lumpy structures called ‘goosebumps’, which scientists believe could be the signatures of early ‘cometesimals’ that assembled to create the comet in the early phases of Solar System formation.

    Rosetta will get its closest look yet at these fascinating structures on 30 Se...

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    Avoiding ‘Traffic Jam’ creates impossibly bright ‘Lighthouse’

    September 9, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artist’s impression of the “New Lighthouse Model.” Credit: NAOJ

    Artist’s impression of the “New Lighthouse Model.” Credit: NAOJ

    A supercomputer recreated a blinking impossibly bright “monster pulsar.” The central energy source of enigmatic pulsating Ultra Luminous X-ray sources (ULX) could be a neutron star according to numerical simulations performed by a research group led by Tomohisa Kawashima at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). ULXs, which are remarkably bright X-ray sources, were thought to be powered by black holes. But in 2014, the X-ray space telescope “NuSTAR” detected unexpected periodic pulsed emissions in a ULX named M82 X-2. The discovery of this object named “ULX-pulsar” has puzzled astrophysicists...

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    Ripples in fabric of Space-time? 100s of undiscovered black holes

    September 9, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Hubble Space Telescope Observation of the central region of the Galactic globular cluster NGC 6101: Compared to the majority of Galactic globular clusters, NGC 6101 shows a less concentrated distribution of observable stars. Credit: NASA

    Hubble Space Telescope Observation of the central region of the Galactic globular cluster NGC 6101: Compared to the majority of Galactic globular clusters, NGC 6101 shows a less concentrated distribution of observable stars. Credit: NASA

    Globular clusters are spherical collections of stars which orbit around a galactic centre such as our Milky-way galaxy. Using advanced computer simulations, the team at the University of Surrey were able to see the un-see-able by mapping a globular cluster known as NGC 6101, from which the existence of black holes within the system was deduced. These black holes are a few times larger than the Sun, and form in the gravitational collapse of massive stars at the end of their lives...

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