Category Astronomy/Space

Artist’s concept of the Milky Way. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

University of Birmingham’s School of Physics and Astronomy team has reported the detection of resonant acoustic oscillations of stars in ‘M4’, one of the oldest known clusters of stars in the Galaxy, some 13 billion years old. Using data from the NASA Kepler/K2 mission, they studied resonant oscillations asteroseismology. These oscillations lead to miniscule changes or pulses in brightness, and are caused by sound trapped inside the stars. By measuring the tones in this ‘stellar music’, it is possible to determine the mass and age of individual stars. Thus asteroseismology can be used to study early history of our Galaxy.

The M4 cluster (top) with sections showing white dwarf stars shown in the bottom left and right...

Close-up of Sputnik Planum shows the slowly overturning cells of nitrogen ice. Boulders of water ice and methane debris (red) that have broken off hills surrounding the heart have collected at the boundaries of the cells. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

A large section of Pluto’s icy surface is renewed by convection that replace older ices with fresher material. Combining computer models with topographic and compositional data gathered by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft last summer, New Horizons team members have been able to determine the depth of this layer of solid nitrogen ice within Pluto’s distinctive “heart” feature, Sputnik Planum – and how fast that ice is flowing.

Mission scientists used state-of-the-art computer simula...

Spiral galaxies like the Milky Way are shown in the center, surrounded by the circumgalactic medium, which appears as black to our eyes. However, the circumgalactic medium contains very hot gas, shown in red, orange, and white that outweighs the central galaxies. The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope is an ultra-violet spectrograph that can probe these gaseous filaments and clumps. Credit: Adrien Thob, LJMU

Galaxies “waste” large amounts of heavy elements generated by star formation by ejecting them up to a million light years away into their surrounding halos and deep space, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder...