Comet Ison tagged posts

An enhanced image of Comet ISON taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in May 2013. Credit: NASA

Comet ISON, a bright ball of frozen matter from the earliest days of the universe, was inbound from the Oort Cloud at the edge of the solar system and expected to pierce the Sun’s corona on Nov. 28. Scientists were expecting quite a show. But instead of a brilliant cosmic display, there was … nothing. “The first thing we did was make sure that we had definitely seen nothing,” said Paul Bryans, NCAR, who was looking for the comet using NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. “We did image processing just to make sure nothing was there, and it wasn’t. But that’s not necessarily a boring result. That can tell us something.”

“We think that the most likely thing that happened is that Comet ISON broke up b...

The Great Barred Spiral Galaxy in the constellation Fornax is, at 200,000 light-years across, one of the largest galaxies known to astronomers. Credit: ESO, IDA, Danish 1.5 m, R. Gendler, J-E. Ovaldsen, C. Thöne, and C. Feron

FORTIS will give clues to how galaxies grow with birth and growth cessation of new stars. Rocketeers led by Johns Hopkins astrophysicist Stephan R. McCandliss fired a 58-ft unmanned rocket from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico more than 170 miles up for a brief but clear look at the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy. Using an onboard spectrographic telescope McCandliss team recorded UV observations of H2, the main fuel of star formation, that surrounds the galaxy.

The parabolic flight lasted about 15 min from liftoff to the time the rocket parachuted back to Eart...