First-Ever Census of Variable Mira-Type Stars in Galaxy Outside the Local Group
An international team led by ESO astronomer Marina Rejkuba has discovered more than 1000 luminous red variable stars in the nearby elliptical galaxy Centaurus A (NGC 5128).
Brightness changes and periods of these stars were measured accurately and reveal that they are mostly cool long-period variable stars of the so-called ‘Mira-type’. The observed variability is caused by stellar pulsation.
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A NASA robotic geologist named Spirit began its seven-month journey to Mars at 1:58:47 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (10:58:47 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time) today when its Delta II launch vehicle thundered aloft from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.
The spacecraft, first of a twin pair in NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover project, separated successfully from the Delta’s third stage about 36 minutes after launch, while over the Indian Ocean. Flight controllers at NASA’s Jet Propul
A small, bizarre cluster of a million young stars, enshrouded in thick gas and dust in a nearby dwarf galaxy, has been confirmed by Jean Turner, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy, and her colleagues, in the June 5 issue of the journal Nature.
Turner and her colleagues estimate that the stars are still in the process of forming, and are less than a million years old — extremely young by astronomical standards.
The cluster contains more than 4,000 massive “O” stars, each a milli
The first overview analysis of a year’s worth of high-resolution infrared data gathered by the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) on NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft is opening Mars to a new kind of detailed geological analysis and revealing a dynamic planet that has experienced dramatic environmental change.
The report by THEMIS’s science team will appear in an upcoming issue of Science and will be released on June 5 in the magazine’s online preview, Science Express.
“THEMIS
Europe’s first mission to the Red Planet, continues its successful mission with another successful ’’high-risk’’ post-launch milestone. Mars Express engineers breathed a sigh of relief this morning at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC), in Germany.
If a particularly delicate operation had not proceeded as planned, it would have been impossible to deploy the Mars Express lander, Beagle 2, on arrival at Mars.
This crucial operation consisted of releasing
NASA-funded project to search for underground water on Mars
University of Iowa professor and space physicist Don Gurnett is hoping to receive an uplifting word from western Asia on Monday.
That’s because Gurnett heads a $7 million, NASA-funded project to search for underground water on Mars, a project whose radar instrument is aboard the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express spacecraft using a Soyuz rocket and scheduled for launch at 12:45 p.m. CDT Monday, June
An international team of astronomers headed by Dr. Michael Drinkwater (Queensland, Australia), Dr. Michael Gregg (Livermore, USA) and Dr. Michael Hilker from the University of Bonn has discovered a new kind of small, very compact galaxy. Their findings will be published in the next edition of the prestigious academic journal Nature on 29th May. This new type of galaxy could help to explain the discrepancy between observations and cosmological models.
The galaxies in our universe are not all
The first detailed map of space within about 1,000 light years of Earth places the solar system in the middle of a large hole that pierces the plane of the galaxy, perhaps left by an exploding star one or two million years ago.
The new map, produced by University of California, Berkeley, and French astronomers, alters the reigning view of the solar neighborhood. In that picture, the sun lies in the middle of a hot bubble – a region of million-degree hydrogen gas with 100-1,000 times fewer
University of California, Berkeley’s RHESSI satellite, launched last year by NASA, was snapping X-ray pictures of solar flares in December when it caught an extremely bright background gamma-ray burst, revealing a novel physical feature of these gamma rays – their polarization.
The result sheds new light on the driving force behind these mysterious explosions.
Gamma-ray bursts are mysterious flashes of gamma-ray photons that pop off about once a day randomly in the sky, briefl
Single-molecule switches have the potential to shrink computing circuits dramatically, but new results from the Arizona State University lab that first described how to wire a single molecule between gold contacts now show that laboratory-standard wired molecules have an unavoidable tendency to “blink” randomly.
In the May 30, 2003, Science, Stuart Lindsay and colleagues identify the cause of this blinking behavior as random, temporary breaks in the chemical bond between the wired molecule
New features may make southern sky’s ’Coalsack’ ideal for further study
Stargazers call a prominent dark black region in the Southern Hemisphere’s night sky the Coalsack. Even for naked-eye observers, the cloud of cold gas that makes up the Coalsack is hard to miss: It covers a part of the misty luminescence of the Milky Way, blocking out distant stars of our galaxy with the deep black shades that have earned the Coalsack its name.
A newly discovered aspect of the C
A new study by University of Toronto researchers offers the first-ever glimpse inside a laser while it’s operating, a breakthrough that could lead to more powerful and efficient lasers for fibre-optic communication systems.
“We’ve seen the inner workings of a laser in action,” says investigator Ted Sargent, a professor in the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “We’ve produced a topographical map of the landscape that electrons see as they flow into these
Astronomers led by the University of Colorado and Carnegie Observatories have shown that a miniature galaxy less than one-hundredth the size of the Milky Way is ejecting large quantities of gas and energy into huge regions of intergalactic space.
“This discovery suggests tiny galaxies that appear very faint and dormant today were once much brighter and more active,” said CU-Boulder graduate student Brian Keeney. “It also indicates similar galaxy systems may have been primarily responsible fo
Astronomers Steve Howell of the University of California, Riverside and Thomas E. Harrison and Heather Osborne of New Mexico State University have found from their observations of over a dozen mass-losing stars in ’cataclysmic variables’ that most of the secondary stars do not appear to be normal main sequence stars in terms of their apparent abundances. To various degrees, each star seems to have low to no carbon and other odd mixtures of elements such as sodium and calcium, the astronomer
Niobium clusters display non-metallic properties at ultra-cold temperatures
The May 23 issue of the journal Science answers that question with an account of the surprising behavior exhibited by nanometer-scale clusters of the metal niobium. When the clusters are cooled to below 20 degrees Kelvin, electrical charges in them suddenly shift, creating structures known as dipoles.
“This is very strange, because no metal is supposed to be able to do this,” said Walter de Heer, a p
Images made by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have revealed two distant cosmic construction sites buzzing with activity. This discovery shows how super massive black holes control the growth of massive galaxies in the distant universe.
X-rays were detected from vast clouds of high-energy particles around the galaxies 3C294 and 4C41.17, which are 10 and 12 billion light years from Earth, respectively. The energetic particles were left over from past explosive events that can be traced
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