Category Astronomy/Space

This artist’s impression of the water snowline around the young star V883 Orionis, as detected with ALMA. Credit: A. Angelich (NRAO/AUI/NSF)/ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

A violent outburst by the young star V883 Orionis has given astronomers their first view of a water “snowline” in a protoplanetary disk – the transition point around the star where the temperature and pressure are low enough for water ice to form. An abrupt increase in the brightness of the star “flash heated” the inner portion of the disk, pushing the water snowline out much farther than normal, enabling astronomers to image it with ALMA. Under normal conditions, the water snowline would be much too close to the protostar to observe directly, even with ALMA’s remarkable resolution.

Typically, heat from a young Sun-like star preve...

This artist’s impression depicts the accretion disc surrounding a black hole, in which the inner region of the disc precesses. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab

The ESA’s orbiting X-ray observatory, XMM-Newton, has proved the existence of a “gravitational vortex” around a black hole. The discovery, aided by NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) mission, solves a mystery that has eluded astronomers for more than 30 years, and will allow them to map the behavior of matter very close to black holes. It could also open the door to future investigations of Albert Einstein’s general relativity. Matter falling into a black hole heats up as it plunges to its doom. Before it passes into the black hole and is lost from view forever, it can reach millions of degrees...

This spectacular image of the Orion Nebula star-formation region was obtained from multiple exposures using the HAWK-I infrared camera on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. This is the deepest view ever of this region and reveals more very faint planetary-mass objects than expected. Credit: ESO/H. Drass et al.

HAWK-I infrared instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has revealed the deepest and most comprehensive view of the Orion Nebula to date. It has revealed a great abundance of faint brown dwarfs and isolated planetary-mass objects. The very presence of these low-mass bodies provides an exciting insight into the history of star formation within the nebula itself...

At left, in optical light, UGC 1382 appears to be a simple elliptical galaxy. But spiral arms emerged when astronomers incorporated ultraviolet and deep optical data (middle). Combining that with a view of low-density hydrogen gas (shown in green at right), scientists discovered that UGC 1382 is gigantic. Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech/SDSS/NRAO/L. Hagen and M. Seibert

About 250 million light-years away, there’s a neighborhood of our universe that astronomers had considered quiet and unremarkable. But now, scientists have uncovered an enormous, bizarre galaxy possibly formed from the parts of other galaxies. A new study reveals the secret of UGC 1382, a galaxy that had originally been thought to be old, small and typical...