Category Astronomy/Space

NEOWISE series of infrared images of comet C/2012 K1 (PanSTARRS) on May 20, 2014. Credit: NASA/JPL

An international team of researchers led by Martin Cordiner of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has conducted measurements of H3OH (methanol) emission from comet C/2012 K1 (PanSTARRS) that could yield invaluable information about cometary compositions and provide insights on the formation of our solar system.

ALMA, thanks to its unprecedented resolution and sensitivity, was previously used to study the distributions of HCN (hydrogen cyanide), HNC (hydrogen isocyanide) and H2CO (formaldehyde) in the inner comae of comets C/2012 F6 (Lemmon) and C/2012 S1 (ISON)...

Image of galaxy tail. Credit: Image courtesy of International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR)

Astronomers have discovered a spectacular tail of gas more than 300,000 light years across coming from a nearby galaxy in the Virgo cluster, a group of galaxies 55 million light years from our own Milky Way. The plume is made up of hydrogen gas – the material new stars are made of – and is 5X longer than the galaxy itself. The discovery was made by an international team of scientists led by Dr Alessandro Boselli at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille in France. Scientists noticed long ago that galaxy NGC 4569 contained less gas than expected but they could not see where it had gone.

“We didn’t have the smoking gun, the clear evidence of direct removal of gas from the galaxy,” ...

Surrounded by an envelope of dust, the subject of this Hubble image is a young forming star Text credit: European Space Agency Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt

Surrounded by an envelope of dust, the subject is a young forming star: HBC 1. The star is in an immature and adolescent phase of life, while most of a sun-like star’s life is spent in a stable stage comparable to human adulthood. In this view, HBC 1 illuminates a wispy reflection nebula known as IRAS 00044+6521. Formed from clouds of interstellar dust, reflection nebulae do not emit any visible light of their own. Instead, like fog encompassing a lamppost, they shine via the light reflected off the dust from the stars embedded within...

This is an artists conception of binary star system TYC-2505-672-1. Credit: Jeremy Teaford, Vanderbilt University

Astronomers have discovered an unnamed pair of stars that sets a new record for both the longest duration stellar eclipse (3.5 years) and longest period between eclipses (69 years) in a binary system. Imagine living on a world where, every 69 yrs, the sun disappears in a near-total eclipse that lasts for over 3yrs. Nearly 10,000 light years from Earth the newly discovered system, catalog no. TYC 2505-672-1 was made by a team of astronomers from Vanderbilt and Harvard with the assistance of colleagues at Lehigh, Ohio State and Pennsylvania State universities, Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network and the American Association of Variable Star Observers..

The previous r...