Category Astronomy/Space

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...

This is NGC 1332, a galaxy with a black hole at its center whose mass has been measured at high precision by ALMA. Credit: Carnegie-Irvine Galaxy Survey

Findings could help shed light on how galaxies and their supermassive black holes form. It’s about 660 million times as massive as our sun, and a cloud of gas circles it at about 1.1 million mph. This supermassive black hole sits at the center of a galaxy NGC 1332, 73 million light years from Earth. And an international team of scientists that includes Rutgers associate professor Andrew J. Baker has measured its mass with unprecedented accuracy with Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

A black hole can form after matter, often from an exploding star, condenses via gravity...