Category Astronomy/Space

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...

NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/CXC/SAO Oceanic sediment contains an iron isotope that ancient bacteria accumulated 2.2 million years ago when debris rained on Earth from a supernova explosion. Shown are the remnants of a much younger supernova remnant, Cassiopeia A, shown in a composite image from three NASA observatories.

A team from Germany and Austria has found possible evidence of iron from a supernova in sediment cores taken from the floor of the Pacific Ocean. The study began when team members came across information regarding magnetotactic bacteria during internet searches. It is a type of bacteria that lives in ocean sediments and absorbs tiny amounts of iron. As sediment builds, the bacteria die leaving behind bits of iron in the layers of sediment...

Venus approaches the Sun in a 2012 transit visible from Earth. Credit: NASA

A team of researchers with NASA, Uppsala University, Columbia University and the Planetary Science Institute has created several simulations of conditions on Venus billions of years ago using Earth climate models and has found some instances that suggest the planet may at one time have been capable of harboring life.

Venus is extraordinarily hot, volcanically active and has an atmosphere that is mostly carbon dioxide. But the simulations created by the research team suggest it may not have always been that way. They started with the idea that Venus and Earth were probably similar billions of years ago—a time when Earth’s atmosphere was also mostly carbon dioxide...

The observed (open circles) and theoretical (solid line) light curve of V921 Her. Theoretical light curve without contaminated by the third light is plotted with dashed line. Credit: Zhou et al., 2016.

China’s Chang’e-3 mission landed on the moon in Dec 2013 and deployed lunar rover Yutu or Jade Rabbit; it also carried a robotic telescope designed to observe various celestial objects such as galaxies, active galactic nuclei, variable stars, binaries, novae, quasars and blazars in the near-ultraviolet band. The Lunar-based Ultraviolet Telescope (LUT) was recently used by a team of Chinese astronomers to observe a peculiar binary star designated V921 Her.

LUT is the first robotic astronomical telescope deployed on the lunar surface...