William Herschel Telescope tagged posts

Evidence of giant rings in Venus’s atmosphere uncovered in archived observations

Scientists discover evidence of giant rings in Venus's atmosphere
Venus as observed in total flux F (left) and polarized flux U (right) through the Hα continuum filter (see Table 1). Due to Venus’s orientation, the planetary scattering plane makes an angle of about 45° with ExPo’s optical plane (the two orthogonal directions along which ExPo measured U are indicated below the image). The spatial resolution is approximately 775 km at the subobserver point on Venus’s disk. Credit: The Planetary Science Journal (2026). DOI: 10.3847/psj/ae7e6f

In 2010, scientists waiting to use the William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands captured a brief 36 minutes of images of Venus. They were waiting for the sun to set so they could look at distant stars and dust disks around young stars...

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Gaia Satellite has discovered a rare Binary System where one star is ‘eating’ the other, but neither star has hydrogen, the most common element in the Universe

IMAGE: Artist's impression of Gaia14aae. Credit: Marisa Grove/Institute of Astronomy

IMAGE: Artist’s impression of Gaia14aae.
Credit: Marisa Grove/Institute of Astronomy

It is a type of 2-star system known as a Cataclysmic Variable, where one super dense white dwarf star is stealing gas from its companion star, effectively ‘cannibalising’ it.The system could also be an important laboratory for studying ultra-bright supernova explosions, which are a vital tool for measuring the expansion of the Universe. The system, named Gaia14aae, is 730 light years away in Draco constellation. It was discovered by the ESA’s Gaia satellite in August 2014 when it suddenly became 5 times brighter over the course of a single day.

>>Additional observations made by the Center for Backyard Astrophysics (CBA), a collaboration of amateur and professional astronomers, found the system is a rare e...

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