On Christmas Day 2004, the Cassini spacecraft flawlessly released ESA’s Huygens probe, passing another challenging milestone for Cassini-Huygens mission. But, with no telemetry data from Huygens, how do we know the separation went well?
At 3:00 CET on 25 December, the critical sequence loaded into the software on board Cassini was executed and, within a few seconds, Huygens was sent on its 20-day trip towards Titan. As data from Cassini confirm, the pyrotechnic devices were fir
Deal unites firms with shared vision of affordable access to space
Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL), the British world-leader in advanced small satellites, has announced the sale of a ten percent stake to California-based commercial rocket company SpaceX. The transaction enables the two companies to work together closely to achieve their shared vision of making access to space significantly cheaper and more responsive.
Rapid response microsatellites and minisatellit
A trio of massive, young star clusters found embedded in a star cloud may shed light on the formation of super-star clusters and globular clusters.
The discovery, made with images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, is being presented today by You-Hua Chu and Rosie Chen of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Kelsey Johnson of the University of Virginia to the American Astronomical Society meeting in San Diego. This finding indicates that super-star clusters may b
When our solar system was young, its biggest babies–Jupiter and Saturn–threw tantrums by the trillion. The huge planets hurled ice-covered rocky bodies from the inner solar system far past the orbit of Pluto. Some of those bodies revisit their old neighborhood as “long period” comets, which have been called the Rosetta Stone of the solar system because their pristine composition holds the key to understanding how Earth and similar planets formed. Astrophysicists from the University of Minne
In the largest galaxy survey ever, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) confirmed the role of gravity in growing structures in the universe, using the result to precisely measure the geometry of the universe.
The SDSS researchers from the University of Arizona, New York University, the University of Portsmouth (UK), the University of Pittsburgh and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, detected ripples in the galaxy distribution made by sound waves generated soon after the Bi
Unique follow up observations carried out with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope are providing important supporting evidence for the existence of a candidate planetary companion to a relatively bright young brown dwarf star located 225 light-years away in the southern constellation Hydra.
Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile detected a planet candidate in April 2004 with infrared observations using adaptive optics to sharpen th
An international team of astronomers has discovered within the heart of a nearby spiral galaxy a quasar whose light spectrum indicates that it is billions of light years away. The finding poses a cosmic puzzle: How could a galaxy 300 million light years away contain a stellar object several billion light years away?
The team’s findings, which were presented today in San Diego at the January meeting of the American Astronomical Society and which will appear in the February 10 issue
To celebrate the New Year – and to mark the formal debut of its online Image Gallery – the Gemini Observatory has released three striking new images.
The first, taken by the Gemini North telescope atop Mauna Kea on the big island of Hawaii, was made public on New Year’s Eve, 2004, and shows the face-on spiral galaxy NGC 6946 ablaze with galactic fireworks. Each explosion of pink is a region of active star formation, where the fierce light of newborn stars is exciting the sur
A swarm of 10,000 or more black holes may be orbiting the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, according to new results from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This would represent the highest concentration of black holes anywhere in the Galaxy.
These relatively small, stellar-mass black holes, along with neutron stars, appear to have migrated into the Galactic Center over the course of several billion years. Such a dense stellar graveyard has been predicted for years,
New ultraviolet observations indicate a Milky Way star is spinning nearly 200 times faster than Earth’s sun, the probable result of a merger between two sun-like stars whose binary orbit recently collapsed, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder astronomer.
The yellow giant, known as FK Comae Berenices, or FK Com, is 10 times larger than the sun and is emitting spectacular amounts of X-rays, ultraviolet light and radio waves as it rotates furiously, said Senior Resea
Astronomers have discovered how ominous black holes can create life in the form of new stars, proving that jet-induced star formation may have played an important role in the formation of galaxies in the early universe.
This false-color image incorporates infrared data (invisible to the human eye). The blue regions (essentially the whole of Minkowski’s Object) show enhanced star formation. The red background galaxy and two red foreground stars appear in sharp contrast. The red over
Astronomers say a dusty disc swirling around the nearby star Vega is bigger than earlier thought. It was probably caused by collisions of objects, perhaps as big as the planet Pluto, up to 2,000 kilometers (about 1,200 miles) in diameter.
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has seen the dusty aftermath of this “run-in.” Astronomers think embryonic planets smashed together, shattered into pieces and repeatedly crashed into other fragments to create ever-finer debris. Vega’s l
A team of scientists from the University of Delaware has discovered that brown dwarfs–celestial bodies that are often referred to as failed stars–can be surrounded by clouds of very hot and very cool gas.
The UD research team of John E. Gizis, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, Harry L. Shipman, Annie Jump Cannon Chair of Physics and Astronomy, and James A. “Rusty” Harvin, researcher in physics and astronomy, used the Hubble Space Telescope to show for the first time
Hubble Space Telescope data, analyzed by a Yale astronomer using gravitational lensing techniques, has generated a spatial map demonstrating the clumped substructure of dark matter inside clusters of galaxies.
Clusters of galaxies (about a million, million times the mass of our sun), are typically made up of hundreds of galaxies bound together by gravity. About 90 percent of their mass is dark matter. The rest is ordinary atoms in the form of hot gas and stars.
Althou
To understand our planet’s magnetic field, Wisconsin scientists are studying a ball of molten metal
In an underground bunker that brushes up against a barnyard on one side and a cornfield on the other, scientists from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, are trying to solve an enduring cosmic mystery: how does the Earth generate its magnetic field–the vast, invisible web that shapes the aurora, makes compass needles point north, and shields us from solar storms? And how do simi
Astronomers have found the most powerful eruption in the universe using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. A super massive black hole generated this eruption by growing at a remarkable rate. This discovery shows the enormous appetite of large black holes, and the profound impact they have on their surroundings.
The huge eruption was seen in a Chandra image of the hot, X-ray emitting gas of a galaxy cluster called MS 0735.6+7421. Two vast cavities extend away from the super mas
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