Category Astronomy/Space

A false-color infrared image of a young, star-forming dust cloud with several embedded cores (identified in red). A new infrared study of 3218 cores in various stages of development has enabled astronomers to categorize the temperatures, densities, and evolutionary characters of young stellar nurseries. Credit: NASA/Spitzer and P. Myers

Stars like the Sun begin their lives as cold, dense cores of dust and gas that collapse under the influence of gravity until nuclear fusion is ignited. These cores contain hundreds to thousands of solar-masses of material and have gas densities ~1000X greater than typical interstellar regions (the typical value is ~1 molecule/cubic cm)...

The Zooniverse citizen science project Space Warps recently reported that its online volunteers have helped to discover 29 new gravitational lenses, and 30 other possible lenses from the Canada France Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey. Not only are these important discoveries in their own right but they also prove just how good citizen scientists are at hunting down unusual objects. Credit; http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/science-blog/hunting-%E2%80%98halos%E2%80%99-universe-0

Thanks to the Internet, amateur volunteers known as “citizen scientists” can readily donate their time and effort to science–in fields ranging from medicine to zoology to astrophysics...

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Jason-3 spacecraft onboard is shown at Vandenberg Air Force Base Space Launch Complex 4 East in Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, January 16, 2016. REUTERS/Gene BlevinsSpace …

A $180 million satellite to study the world’s oceans in a changing climate will blast off Sunday atop a Falcon 9 rocket, which SpaceX will try to land on a floating platform after launch. The satellite, Jason-3 will show how global warming and sea level rise affect wind speeds and currents as close as 1 km from shore, whereas past satellites were limited to ~6.2 miles from the coast. “That is a significant advantage over our predecessors,” said Jim Silva,National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The technology will also monitor global sea surface heights, tropica...

Pluto’s Wright Mons in color Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Scientists with NASA’s New Horizons mission have assembled this highest-resolution color view of one of two potential cryovolcanoes spotted on the surface of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft in July 2015. This feature, known as Wright Mons, was informally named by the New Horizons team in honor of the Wright brothers. At ~90 miles across and 2.5 miles high, this feature is enormous. If it is in fact an ice volcano, it would be the largest such feature discovered in the outer solar system.

Mission scientists are intrigued by the sparse distribution of red material in the image and wonder why it is not more widespread...