Category Astronomy/Space

This composite image shows the size and location of the Smith Cloud on the sky. The cloud appears in false-color, radio wavelengths as observed by the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. The visible-light image of the background star field shows the cloud’s location in the direction of the summer constellation Aquila. The cloud is 15 degrees across in angular size — the width of an outstretched hand at arm’s length. The apparent size of the full moon is added for comparison. Credit: B. Saxton and F. Lockman (NRAO/AUI/NSF), and A. Mellinger

New Hubble telescope observations suggest a high-velocity H gas cloud was launched from the outer regions of our own galaxy around 70 million years ago...

Associate Professor Joan Vaccaro, of Griffith University’s Centre for Quantum Dynamics Credit: Griffith University

New research from Griffith University’s Centre for Quantum Dynamics is broadening perspectives on time and space. A/Prof Joan Vaccaro challenges the long-held presumption that time evolution—the incessant unfolding of the universe over time—is an elemental part of Nature. She suggests there may be a deeper origin due to a difference between the directions of time: to the future and to the past.

“If you want to know where the universe came from and where it’s going, you need to know about time,” says Associate Professor Vaccaro.
“Experiments on subatomic particles over the past 50 years ago show that Nature doesn’t treat both directions of time equally...

Mu Centauri. Credit: Palomar Observatory/STScI/WikiSky

510 light years away, Mu Centauri is a very interesting dwarf nova, a close binary star system in which white dwarf accretes matter from its companion. Although little is know about Mu Centauri, we could observe temporal variations of its brightness and its flickering on a relatively low level. It was also found that this system’s light curve contains odd consistent modulations on 2 different periods.

Bruch used 0.6-m Zeiss and the 0.6-m Boller & Chivens telescopes of Observatorio do Pico dos Dias in Brazil. Photometric observations of its light curves were conducted on 6 nights in Feb, May, Jun 2015. The brightness of Mu Centauri was measured as magnitude difference with respect to several comparison stars in the field...

This is a portrait of the massive globular cluster NGC 1783 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. This dense swarm of stars is located about 160,000 light years from Earth and has the mass of about 170,000 Suns. A new study by astronomers from the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University (KIAA), the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), Northwestern University and the Adler Planetarium suggests the globular cluster swept up stray gas and dust from outside the cluster to give birth to three different generations of stars. Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA. Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt (geckzilla.com)

Astronomers have for the 1st time found old globular clusters with young populations of stars that d...