Category Astronomy/Space

An artist’s rendering shows the planet HD 20782, the most eccentric planet ever known, passing its star in close orbit. Credit: NASA

Extrasolar planet swings around its star like it’s a comet. Led by SF State Uni astronomer Stephen Kane, a team has spotted an extrasolar planet about 117 light-years from earth that boasts the most eccentric orbit yet seen. They detected a signal of reflected light from the planet HD 20782 – a “flash” of starlight bouncing off the eccentric planet’s atmosphere as it made its closest orbital approach to its star.

In this case, “eccentric” refers to how elliptical a planet’s orbit is around its star...

Image from “The atmosphere of Pluto as observed by New Horizons,” by G.R. Gladstone et al. This material relates to a paper that appeared in the March 18, 2016, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by G.R. Gladstone at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, and colleagues was titled, “The atmosphere of Pluto as observed by New Horizons.” Credit: G.R. Gladstone et al. / Science (2016)

Pluto’s surface exhibits a wide variety of landscapes, results from 5 new studies in this special issue on the New Horizons mission report. The dwarf planet has more differences than similarities with its large moon, Charon. What’s more, the studies in this package reveal, Pluto modifies its space environment – interacting with the solar wind plasma and energetic particles around it...

ALMA image of HL Tau at left; VLA image, showing clump of dust, at right. Credit: Carrasco-Gonzalez, et al.; Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF

New images of a young star made with Very Large Array (VLA) reveal what scientists think may be the very earliest stages in the formation of planets, 450 light-years from Earth. A previous 2014 ALMA image showed gaps in the disk, presumably caused by planet-like bodies sweeping out the dust along their orbits. This image, showing in real life what theorists had proposed for years, was surprising, however, because the star, called HL Tau, is only about a million years old – very young by stellar standards.

The ALMA image showed details of the system in the outer portions of the disk, but in the inner portions of the disk, nearest to the young star, the thick...

The centre of our galaxy is home to many objects capable of producing cosmic rays of high energy, including, in particular, a supernova remnant, a pulsar wind nebula, and a compact cluster of massive stars. Credit: Image courtesy of CEA

For >10 yrs H.E.S.S. observatory, Namibia, run by a collaboration of 42 institutions in 12 countries, has been mapping the centre of our galaxy in very-high-energy gamma rays produced by cosmic rays from the innermost region of the Galaxy. A detailed analysis of the latest H.E.S.S...