Category Astronomy/Space

Olympus Mons is the largest volcano on Mars, possibly the largest in the Solar System. It is more than 372.84 miles (600 km) across and towers 16.8 mils (27 km) above the Mars surface level. Credit: Image courtesy of Freie Universitaet Berlin

The research project is based on image data of the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) installed on the European Mars Express spacecraft, which has been orbiting the red planet since December 2003. Using the camera images, the scientists in the Planetary Sciences and Remote Sensing group generated a mosaic and a terrain model of the Olympus Mons volcano. The image data show that the volcano shield is shaped in the form of arched terraces and the foot of the otherwise very flat volcano drops steeply...

The gravitational pull of Saturn changes the amount of particles spraying from the south pole of Saturn’s active moon Enceladus at different points in its orbit. More particles make the plume appear much brighter in the infrared image at left. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Cornell/SSI

During a recent stargazing session, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft watched a bright star pass behind the plume of gas and dust that spews from Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. At first, the data from that observation had scientists scratching their heads...

The galaxy NGC 128 is viewed with its disc in an edge-on orientation in this SDSS false-colour image. A (peanut shell)-shaped bulge can be seen around the thin disc. Its inner peanut shell is 5 times smaller. Credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey / B.Ciambur (Swinburne University of Technology) / NASA / ESA

Astronomers at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, have discovered an unusually shaped structure in 2 nearby disc galaxies. The team recently developed new imaging software, making it possible to observe the double “peanut shell shape” formed by the distribution of stars bulging from the centres of these galaxies.

Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the researchers realised that two of the galaxies they were studying – NGC128 and NGC2549 – ...

A portion of the region of the sky investigated by the paper, as seen by Herschel. This region is about 1.5 times the size of the full moon in the sky. Credit: JIllian Scudder

A new Uni of Sussex study has cleared the air on what lies behind hot dust visible in the distant universe. Researchers found that the glow of heated dust reaching our planet is frequently due to 3 or 4 galaxies instead of a single one, as scientists had previously assumed. The study applied a statistical method to data from the Herschel Space Observatory to solve one of astrophysics’ great conundrums.

Dr Jillian Scudder said: “This is a really interesting result because when we assumed that one galaxy had to be responsible for all of the dust emission, it implied that the galaxy must be forming a tremendous number o...