Category Astronomy/Space

Comet Churi’s nucleus observed by the Rosetta probe. Credit: Image courtesy of CNRS

The ice buried inside comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko is mainly found in crystalline form, which implies that it originated in the protosolar nebula and is therefore the same age as the Solar System. This discovery was made by an international team led by a researcher at the LAM1 (CNRS/Aix Marseille Université) and also including scientists from the Laboratoire J.-L. Lagrange, Centre de Recherches Pétrographiques et Géochimiques (CNRS/ Université de Lorraine), with support from CNES. Their findings were obtained by analyzing data from the Rosina2 instrument, placed on board ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft.

Little by little, the Rosetta mission is uncovering the secrets of comets, and has now succeeded in sett...

The Very Large Telescope Interferometer at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile has obtained the sharpest view ever of the dusty disc around the close pair of aging stars IRAS 08544-4431. For the first time such discs can be compared to the discs around young stars — and they look surprisingly similar. It is even possible that a disc appearing at the end of a star’s life might also create a second generation of planets. The inset shows the VLTI reconstructed image, with the brighter central star removed. The background view shows the surroundings of this star in the constellation of Vela (The Sails). Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin

As they approach the ends of their lives many stars develop stable discs of gas and dust around them...

The miniaturized CubeSat payload called both CuPID and WASP returned data about a physical phenomenon called charge exchange. Credit: NASA

The camera, which incorporated a never-before-flown focusing technology when it debuted in late 2012, is a gift that keeps giving. NASA recently selected a miniaturized version of the original X-ray camera to fly as a CubeSat mission to study Earth’s magnetic cusps – regions in the magnetic cocoon around our planet near the poles where the magnetic field lines dip down toward the ground...

This oblique image of Basho shows the distinctive dark halo that encircles the crater. The halo is composed of so-called Low Reflectance Material (LRM), which was excavated from depth when the crater was formed. Basho is also renowned for its bright ray craters, which render the crater easily visible even from very far away. Credit: Courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Scientists have long been puzzled about what makes Mercury’s surface so dark. The innermost planet reflects much less sunlight than the Moon, a body on which surface darkness is controlled by the abundance of iron-rich minerals. These are known to be rare at Mercury’s surface, so what is the “darkening agent” there?

About a year ago, scientists proposed that Mer...