It was on 9 November last year that ESA’s Venus Express spacecraft lifted off from the desert of Kazakhstan onboard a Soyuz-Fregat rocket. Now, after having travelled 400 million kilometres in only about five months, the spacecraft is about to reach its final destination. The rendezvous is due to take place on 11 April.
First step: catching Venus
To begin to explore our Earth’s hot and hazy sister planet, Venus Express must complete a critical first step, the most challengin
Ring in Mab’s oribit intriguingly similar to Saturn’s blue ring in Enceladus’ orbit
The outermost ring of Uranus, discovered just last year, is bright blue, making it only the second known blue ring in the solar system, according to a report this week in the journal Science.
Perhaps not coincidentally, both blue rings are associated with small moons.
“The outer ring of Saturn is blue and has Enceledus right smack at its brightest spot, and Uranus i
An international team of astronomers led by D. Hudson from the University of Bonn has detected a proto supermassive binary black hole in images of NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory. They found that these two black holes are gravitationally bound and orbit each other. Their results will be published in an upcoming issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.
An international team of astrophysicists, led by D. Hudson from the University of Bonn and including the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
“Da police are not here to create disorder; dere here to preserve disorder.” — Richard J. Daley, Chicago mayor, explaining to the media the role of the police during the riotous 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Police keep order. That’s why, for example, they issue tickets for “disturbing the peace.” Thus the only logical conclusion to Mayor Daley’s famous quote above — other than dismissing it as the result of a tangled tongue — is sometimes disorder spawns order.
Sounds im
Almost 40 years have passed since top secret nuclear weapon warning satellites accidentally discovered bursts of high energy gamma rays coming from space. Although many thousands of gamma ray bursts (GRBs) have since been detected, the origin and nature of these bursts is still not well understood.
One example of an unusual gamma ray burst occurred on 1 August 2005, when instruments on board the NASA-UK-Italy Swift spacecraft detected a bizarre GRB, which displayed unprecedented beha
New computer simulations of Mercury’s formation show the fate of material blasted out into space when a large proto-planet collided with a giant asteroid 4.5 billion years ago. The simulations, which track the material over several million years, shed light on why Mercury is denser than expected and show that some of the ejected material would have found its way to the Earth and Venus.
“Mercury is an unusually dense planet, which suggests that it contains far more metal than would be exp
A new image of the centre of a cluster of galaxies has revealed massive filamentary structures that give a rare insight into the evolution of galaxy clusters.
“The star forming regions in the cluster that we’d observed previously were just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve now observed filaments of gas streaming out from these regions that are approximately 490 thousand light years across. The gaseous trails mark the path of galaxies travelling at high speed through the cluster. The origin of
A study of supernova remnants – material blown out into space during death throes of giant stars – has shown that a bubble of gas enveloping our Solar System is being shoved backwards by the debris of another, more recent, supernova.
Over the last few million years, several stars have exploded within the Milky Way and they have left behind bubbles of expanding, hot gas that radiate low-energy X-rays. The Solar System sits within one of these shells, known as the “Local Hot Bubble
Astronomers at Liverpool John Moores University may have solved the mystery of how spiral galaxies in clusters are transformed over time into smooth disks. Results from a study of galaxy clusters confirms that the slow-motion conditions needed for the transformation are occurring among populations of galaxies falling towards the cluster centre.
Over the past several billion years the predominant shape of disc galaxies in clusters has changed from a spiral to a smooth disk. Theor
First results from the Arecibo Galaxy Environment Survey (AGES) suggest the discovery of a new dark galaxy. The AGES survey, which started in January 2006, is the most sensitive, large-scale survey of neutral hydrogen to date. Neutral hydrogen is found in most galaxies and it is a key tool in the search for dark galaxies as it can be detected even when there are no stars or other radiation sources to “shine a light” on matter.
The new candidate dark galaxy is located near NGC1156, an appar
A study of the Universe’s most massive galaxy clusters has shown that mergers play a vital role in their evolution.
Astronomers at Oxford University and the Gemini Observatory used a combination of data from the twin Gemini Telescopes, located in Hawaii and Chile, and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to study populations of stars in the Universe’s most massive galaxy clusters over a range of epochs – the earliest being half the age of the Universe. The HST images were used to map
A team of researchers from EPFL, (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), the University of Lausanne, Northwestern University and Tel Aviv University bring biology and statistical physics together to answer the question of how molecular chaperones fold, unfold and pull proteins around in the cell. Their results appear the week of April 3 in the advance online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A series of discussions in a campus café in Lausanne has blossomed
The rings around all the giant planets in our Solar System are thought to be stabilised by small ‘shepherd moons’ that orbit in or near the rings and stabilize them by gravitational influences.
The narrow F ring of Saturn – which lies just outside the spectacular main rings – is tended by two small shepherds. Prometheus (100 km in diameter) orbits just inside the F ring, while Pandora (85 km in diameter) moves around Saturn just outside the F ring.
Images from Saturn
Over the weekend of 9-10 July 2005 a team of UK and US scientists, led by Dr. Dick Willingale of the University of Leicester, used NASA’s Swift satellite to observe the collision of NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft with comet Tempel 1.
Reporting today (Tuesday) at the UK 2006 National Astronomy Meeting in Leicester, Dr. Willingale revealed that the Swift observations show that the comet grew brighter and brighter in X-ray light after the impact, with the X-ray outburst lasting a total o
Astronomers based at Jodrell Bank Observatory have discovered a giant bridge of methyl alcohol, spanning approximately 288 billion miles, wrapped around a stellar nursery. The gas cloud could help our understanding of how the most massive stars in our galaxy are formed.
The new observations were taken with the UK’s MERLIN radio telescopes, which have recently been upgraded. The team studied an area called W3(OH), a region in our galaxy where stars are being formed by the gravitat
Studies of Jupiter’s auroras by scientists from the University of Leicester have challenged current theories about the processes controlling the biggest light-shows in the Solar System.
The scientists compared a series of ultraviolet images of Jupiter’s auroras taken by the Hubble Space Telescope with simultaneous measurements taken by Cassini showing conditions in the solar wind as the spacecraft flew past the giant planet in December 2000 – January 2001. They found that the
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