Nestled among a triplet of young galaxies more than 12.5 billion light-years away is a cosmic powerhouse: a galaxy that is producing stars nearly 1,000 times faster than our own Milky Way. This energetic starburst galaxy, known as AzTEC-3, together with its gang of calmer galaxies may represent the best evidence yet that large galaxies grow from the merger of smaller ones in the early Universe, a process known as hierarchical merging.
Nov 11th, 2014
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Astronomers have discovered two dust belts surrounded by a large dust halo around young star HD 95086. The findings provide a look back at what our solar system may have resembled in its infancy.
Nov 10th, 2014
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Observations with the ATCA and ALMA radio telescopes have shown signs of something never seen before, located at the center or the remnant of a supernova. It could be a pulsar wind nebula, driven by the spinning neutron star, or pulsar, which astronomers have been searching for since 1987.
Nov 10th, 2014
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Light pollution is not only a problem for astronomy. Scientists from the interdisciplinary project 'Loss of the Night' study how it affects health, society, and the environment. In order to measure how skyglow is changing, they have developed an app for smartphones, which allows citizen scientists to count the number of visible stars in the night sky.
Nov 10th, 2014
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Two NASA and one European spacecraft have gathered new information about the basic properties of a wayward comet that buzzed by Mars Oct. 19, directly detecting its effects on the Martian atmosphere.
Nov 7th, 2014
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Light scattered from dust particles allows a first glance at the side of comet 67P that has been trapped in the darkness of polar night for the last months.
Nov 7th, 2014
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MAGIC telescopes observe an extremely short, powerful outburst of radiation in Galaxy IC 310.
Nov 7th, 2014
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A sounding rocket experiment has detected a surprising surplus of infrared light in the dark space between galaxies, a diffuse cosmic glow as bright as all known galaxies combined. The glow is thought to be from orphaned stars flung out of galaxies.
Nov 7th, 2014
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Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have completed the largest and most sensitive visible-light imaging survey of dusty debris disks around other stars. These dusty disks, likely created by collisions between leftover objects from planet formation, were imaged around stars as young as 10 million years old and as mature as more than 1 billion years old.
Nov 6th, 2014
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Two astrophysicists argue that questions about the future of life on Earth and beyond may soon be resolvable scientifically, thanks to new data about the Earth and about other planets in our galaxy, and by combining the earth-based science of sustainability with the space-oriented field of astrobiology.
Nov 6th, 2014
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For ALMA's first observations in its new and most powerful mode, researchers pointed the antennas at HL Tauri - a young star, about 450 light-years away, which is surrounded by a dusty disc. The resulting image exceeds all expectations and reveals unexpectedly fine detail in the disc of material left over from star birth.
Nov 6th, 2014
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Instead of WIMPS or axions, dark matter may be made of macroscopic objects as small as a few ounces up to the size of a good asteroid, and probably as dense as a neutron star or the nucleus of an atom.
Nov 4th, 2014
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Collisions of heavenly bodies generate almost unimaginable levels of energy. Researchers at Brown University used NASA's ultra-high-speed cannon and computer models to simulate such a collision on Vesta, the second-largest object in the asteroid belt. Their analysis of the images - taken at a million frames per second - shows how Vesta may have gotten the deep grooves that encircle its midsection.
Nov 4th, 2014
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The mystery about a thin, bizarre object in the center of the Milky Way that some astronomers believe to be a hydrogen gas cloud headed toward our galaxy's enormous black hole has been solved by UCLA astronomers.
Nov 4th, 2014
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An international team of astronomers has carried out the most accurate study so far of the cocoon of gas and dust surrounding the GG Tau A system. By combining complementary observations at submillimeter (ALMA and IRAM) wavelengths with those at infrared (VLTI/ESO) wavelengths, the researchers were able to identify the complex dynamics at work in GG Tau.
Nov 3rd, 2014
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By using the full power of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer an international team of astronomers has discovered exozodiacal light close to the habitable zones around nine nearby stars. This light is starlight reflected from dust created as the result of collisions between asteroids, and the evaporation of comets. The presence of such large amounts of dust in the inner regions around some stars may pose an obstacle to the direct imaging of Earth-like planets.
Nov 3rd, 2014
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