Category Astronomy/Space

Beagle-2 landing site. Credit: Yu Tao and Jan-Peter Muller, UCL

The surface of Mars – including the location of Beagle-2 – has been shown in unprecedented detail by UCL scientists using a revolutionary image stacking and matching technique. Exciting pictures of the Beagle-2 lander, the ancient lakebeds discovered by NASA’s Curiosity rover, NASA’s MER-A rover tracks and Home Plate’s rocks have been released by the UCL researchers who stacked and matched images taken from orbit, to reveal objects at a resolution up to 5X greater than previously achieved.

Called Super-Resolution Restoration (SRR) it could be used to search for other artefacts from past failed landings as well as identify safe landing locations for future rover missions...

The elegant simplicity of NGC 4111 hides a more violent history than you might think. NGC 4111 is a lenticular, or lens-shaped, galaxy about 50 million light-years from us in the constellation of Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs).Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt

Lenticular galaxies are an intermediate type of galaxy between an elliptical and a spiral. They host aged stars like ellipticals and have a disk like a spiral. However, that’s where the similarities end: They differ from ellipticals because they have a bulge and a thin disk, but are different from spirals because lenticular discs contain very little gas and dust, and do not feature the many-armed structure that is characteristic of spiral galaxies.

At first sight, NGC 4111 looks like a fairly uneventful gala...

This colorful view of the globular star cluster NGC 6362 was captured by the Wide Field Imager attached to the MPG/ESO 2.2-m telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. Credit: ESO

Globular clusters have for a long time been considered as formed of stars with similar initial chemical composition, but recently, increasing evidence has emerged regarding their more complex nature. NGC 6362 lies 25,000 light years away in the constellation Ara. It is ~13.5 billion years old and at a mass of ~50,000 solar masses, it is the least massive globular cluster with multiple detected photometric stellar populations that have different chemical abundances.

To determine the chemical composition of NGC 6362, the team used the Fibre Large Array Multi Element Spectrograph (FLAMES) mounted on one of ...

The plane of our Galaxy as seen in infrared light from the WISE satellite. The bulge is a distinct component and most of its mass resides in a boxy/peanut bulge, which is in cylindrical rotation. An ancient population, estimated to be 1% of the mass of the bulge, has been detected kinematically detected in the inner Milky Way and does not cylindrically. Instead, this population is likely to have been one of the first parts of the Milky Way to form. Credit: NOAO/AURA/NSF/AIP/A. Kunder

An international team has discovered that the central 2000 light years within the Milky Way Galaxy hosts an ancient population of stars >10 billion years old and their orbits in space preserve the early history of the formation of the Milky Way...