A team led by astronomers in Brazil has used ESO's Very Large Telescope to study the oldest solar twin known to date. Located 250 light-years away, the star HIP 102152 is more like the Sun than any other solar twin - except that it is nearly four billion years older. This older twin may be host to rocky planets and gives us an unprecedented chance to see how the Sun will look when it ages.
Aug 28th, 2013
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Scientists have detected magmatic water - water that originates from deep within the Moon's interior - on the surface of the Moon. These findings represent the first such remote detection of this type of lunar water, and were arrived at using data from NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3).
Aug 27th, 2013
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From 4-10 October, more than twenty organizations spread across four continents will be exploring Mars - and discovering more about Earth in the process. A campaign of networked Mars analog activities is being launched to celebrate World Space Week (WSW) 2013.
Aug 27th, 2013
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Ten years after a Delta II rocket launched NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, lighting up the night sky over Cape Canaveral, Fla., the fourth of the agency's four Great Observatories continues to illuminate the dark side of the cosmos with its infrared eyes.
Aug 23rd, 2013
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An international team of astronomers that are members of the Strategic Exploration of Exoplanets and Disks with Subaru Telescope (SEEDS) Project has observed a disk around the young star RY Tau (Tauri). The team's analysis of the disk shows that a 'fluffy' layer above it is responsible for the scattered light observed in the infrared image.
Aug 23rd, 2013
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Astronomers have assembled, from more than 13 years of observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, a series of time-lapse movies showing a jet of superheated gas - 5,000 light-years long - as it is ejected from a supermassive black hole.
Aug 22nd, 2013
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On Aug. 11, Fermi entered an extended phase of its mission - a deeper study of the high-energy cosmos. This is a significant step toward the science team's planned goal of a decade of observations, ending in 2018.
Aug 22nd, 2013
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Imagine finding freeze-dried meats and fruits, dehydrated vegetables, egg crystals, ghee-like anhydrous butter, powdered milk and chipotle peppers in your kitchen, but not a morsel of fresh food. That's what happened to six 'astronauts' who lived in a simulated Martian base on the slopes of Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano from April 16 to Aug. 13 as part of a HI-SEAS mission.
Aug 21st, 2013
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A team of astronomers from three institutions has developed a new type of telescope camera that makes higher resolution images than ever before, the culmination of 20 years of effort.
Aug 21st, 2013
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Scientists have proposed a new model that elucidates a key step in star formation. They point to 'zombie vortices' as a destabilizing force needed to help protostars accumulate the mass needed to grow into stars.
Aug 20th, 2013
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While observing a newborn star, astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope discovered twin jets of matter blasting out into space at record-breaking speed. These surprisingly forceful molecular 'winds' could help refine our understanding of how stars impact their cloudy nurseries and shape their emerging stellar systems.
Aug 20th, 2013
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In the time it takes you to complete a single workday, or get a full night's sleep, a small fireball of a planet 700 light-years away has already completed an entire year.
Aug 19th, 2013
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A new collaboration aims to learn how dark energy is driving the accelerated expansion of the universe.
Aug 15th, 2013
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CSIRO scientists have written software that could guide spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, show that the planet Nibiru doesn't exist... and prove that the Earth goes around the Sun.
Aug 15th, 2013
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In two NASA-funded studies biofilms grown aboard the International Space Station bound space shuttle were compared with those grown on the ground. The study results show for the first time that spaceflight changes the behavior of bacterial communities.
Aug 15th, 2013
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Just how stars and black holes in the Universe are able to form from rotating matter is one of the big questions of astrophysics. Now, a new publication by HZDR physicists in Physical Review Letters shows how magnetic fields can also cause turbulences within "dead zones," thus making an important contribution to our current understanding of just how compact objects form in the cosmos.
Aug 15th, 2013
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An international team of astronomers led by BoMee Lee has established that mature-looking galaxies existed much earlier than previously known, about 11.5 billion years ago.
Aug 14th, 2013
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Observations with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have revealed a massive cloud of multimillion-degree gas in a galaxy about 60 million light years from Earth. The hot gas cloud is likely caused by a collision between a dwarf galaxy and a much larger galaxy called NGC 1232.
Aug 14th, 2013
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