Category Astronomy/Space

Figure 1: Example of a galaxy merger Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University)

The majority of stars have been believed to lie on a “main sequence,” where the larger a galaxy’s mass, the higher its efficiency to form new stars. However, every now and then a galaxy will display a burst of newly-formed stars that shine brighter than the rest. A collision between 2 large galaxies is usually the cause of such starburst phases, where the cold gas residing in the giant molecular clouds becomes the fuel for sustaining such high rates of star formation.

The question astronomers have been asking is whether such starbursts in the early universe were the result of having an overa...

A topographic view of the South Pole-Aitken Basin. Reds are high; blues are low. Mafic Mound, (the reddish area in the center) stands 800 meters above the surrounding surface. Credit: NASA/Goddard/MIT/Brown

Within a giant impact basin near the moon’s south pole, there sits a large mound of mysterious origin. Research by geologists suggests the mound was formed by unique volcanic processes set in motion by the impact that formed the basin. The formation, known as Mafic Mound, stands about 800m tall and 75 km across, smack in the middle of a giant impact crater known as the South Pole-Aitken Basin. This new study suggests that the mound is the result of a unique kind of volcanic activity set in motion by the colossal impact that formed the basin.

“If the scenarios that we lay out for its for...

Solar flares can provoke geomagnetic perturbations to the Earth. Credit: NASA

According to observations from the Tihany Magnetic Observatory in Hungary, the indices used to assess the Sun’s geomagnetic perturbations to Earth are unable to detect some of these events, which could put both power supply and communication networks at risk. The Tihany Magnetic Observatory registered a solar storm similar to the largest one ever recorded while other observatories were completely unaware of the event.

In 1859 the largest and most powerful solar storm ever recorded, also known as the Carrington Event or the Carrington Flare in honour of the English Astronomer Richard Carrington who observed it, was detected at the Colaba Observatory in India...

Cosmic flypaper Experiments using a high velocity cannon suggest that when asteroids hit targets that are icy or made of porous silicate materials, much of the impact material stays in the crater. The findings have implications for the surface composition of the dwarf planet Ceres. Image: NASA Ames Research Center

A new set of high-velocity impact experiments suggests projectiles that slamming into Ceres tend to stick. The experiments using Vertical Gun Range at NASA’s Ames Research Center, suggest that when asteroids and other impactors hit Ceres, much of the impact material remains on the surface instead of bouncing off into space. The findings suggest Ceres surface could be mainly a mish-mash of meteoritic material collected over billions of years of bombardment.

Ceres is the largest ob...