Category Astronomy/Space

This is a comparison of the relative sizes of several Kepler circumbinary planets. Kepler-1647 b is substantially larger than any of the previously known circumbinary planets. Credit: Lynette Cook

If you cast your eyes toward the constellation Cygnus, you’ll be looking in the direction of the largest planet yet discovered around a double-star system. It’s too faint to see with the naked eye, but a team from Goddard Space Flight Center and San Diego State University, used Kepler Space Telescope to identify the new planet, Kepler-1647b, 3,700 light-years away and ~4.4 billion years old, roughly the same age as Earth. The stars are similar to the sun, with one slightly larger than our home star and the other slightly smaller...

Young stars and nebulosity in Chamaeleon, a constellation visible predominantly in the southern sky. A new study of young (T-Tauri) stars in this region has determined their ages as being between about five – six million years old, as well as determining other properties. Credit: FORS Team, 8.2-meter VLT Antu, ESO

A newborn star typically goes through 4 stages of adolescence. It begins life as a protostar still enshrouded in its natal molecular cloud, accreting new material and developing a proto-planetary disc. Slowly, stellar winds and radiation blow away the surrounding shell of gas and dust, and the third stage, when the surrounding envelope has cleared, is called the T-Tauri phase...

UGC 4879 is an irregular dwarf galaxy Credit: NASA/ESA

The drizzle of stars scattered across this image forms a galaxy known as UGC 4879. UGC 4879 is an irregular dwarf galaxy—as the name suggests, galaxies of this type are a little smaller and messier than their cosmic cousins, lacking the majestic swirl of a spiral or the coherence of an elliptical.

This galaxy is also very isolated. There are about 2.3 million light years between UGC 4879 and its closest neighbor, Leo A, which is about the same distance as that between the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way. This galaxy’s isolation means that it has not interacted with any surrounding galaxies, making it an ideal laboratory for studying star formation uncomplicated by interactions with other galaxies...

MDRS Expedition 143 Commander Paul Knightly walking through stands of Ericameria nauseosa and Epehdra viridis while wearing a simulated spacesuit. Credit: Paul C. Sokoloff; CC-BY 4.0

Future Martian explorers might not need to leave the Earth to prepare themselves for life on the Red Planet. The Mars Society have built an analogue research site in Utah, USA, which simulates the conditions on our neighbouring planet. Practicing the methods needed to collect biological samples while wearing spacesuits, a team of Canadian scientists have studied the diverse local flora...