Category Astronomy/Space

This is an image of Reticulum II obtained by the Dark Energy Survey, using the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. The nine stars described in the paper are circled in red. The insets show the very strong presence of barium, one of the main neutron capture elements the team observed, in three stars. Background image is courtesy of Dark Energy Survey/Fermilab. Foreground image is courtesy of Alexander Ji, Anna Frebel, Anirudh Chiti, and Josh Simon. Credit: Background image is courtesy of Dark Energy Survey/Fermilab. Foreground image is courtesy of Alexander Ji, Anna Frebel, Anirudh Chiti, and Josh Simon.

The lightest few elements in the periodic table formed minutes after the Big Bang...

Comet 252P/LINEAR will safely fly past Earth on March 21, 2016, at a range of about 3.3 million miles (5.2 million kilometers). The following day, comet P/2016 BA14 will safely fly by our planet at a distance of about 2.2 million miles (3.5 million kilometers). Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Two comets that will safely fly past Earth later this month may have more in common than their intriguingly similar orbits. They may be twins of a sort. Comet P/2016 BA14 was discovered on Jan. 22, 2016, by the University of Hawaii’s PanSTARRS telescope on Haleakala, on the island of Maui...

Artist’s illustration of turbulent winds of gas swirling around a black hole. Some of the gas is spiraling inward, but some is being blown away.

New research led by astrophysicists at York University has revealed the fastest winds ever seen at UV wavelengths near a supermassive black hole. “We’re talking wind speeds of 20% the speed of light, which is more than 200 million kilometres an hour. That’s equivalent to a category 77 hurricane,” says Jesse Rogerson, York U. “And we have reason to believe that there are quasar winds that are even faster.”

Astronomers have known about the existence of quasar winds since the late 1960s. At least 1 in 4 quasars have them...

This is Robotelescope MASTER II, created by a joint force of the Lomonosow Moscow State University, Sternberg Astronomical Institute (GAISh) scientists, and Moscow Union “Optica”. Credit: Lomonosow Moscow State University

3 years ago a team of Russian scientists working with the global MASTER network of robotic telescopes spotted that the giant star in Leo minor with a catalogue number TYC 2505-672-1, which was considered to be extinct, in fact just faded – its brightness decreased nearly 100 times.

The MASTER network of telescopes was constructed by MSU scientists for a purpose of detecting and researching Gamma-ray bursts and also thermonuclear flashes on white dwarfs, galactic center flares and quasars...