Category Astronomy/Space

Three of Saturn’s moons, Tethys, Enceladus and Mimas, taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on December 3, 2015 is shown in this NASA image released on February 22, 2016. © NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute / Reuters

Tethys (660 miles or 1,062 kilometers across) appears above the rings, while Enceladus (313 miles or 504 kilometers across) sits just below center. Mimas (246 miles or 396 kilometers across) hangs below and to the left of Enceladus. This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 0.4 degrees above the ring plane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 3, 2015.

The view was acquired at a distance of ~837,000 miles from Enceladus, with an image scale of 5 miles per ...

Tektites of different shapes from Australia. The force of the impact hurled the glass bodies thousands of kilometres. Some left the earth’s atmosphere and acquired their flanged edge on re-entry into the atmosphere (bottom left). Credit: © Institute of Earth Sciences, Heidelberg University

~790,000 years ago there were multiple cosmic impacts on Earth with global consequences. Geoscientists from Heidelberg University reached this conclusion after dating tektites from various parts of the world and studied several of such rock glasses, which originated during impacts of asteroids or comets. The dating method is based on naturally occurring isotopes that allowed them to date tektites more accurately than ever...

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,” ...