Astronomy news
The star that should not exist
(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of European astronomers has used ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to track down a star in the Milky Way that many thought was impossible. They discovered that this star is composed ...
Aug 31, 2011 |
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Re-thinking an alien world
Forty light years from Earth, a rocky world named "55 Cancri e" circles perilously close to a stellar inferno. Completing one orbit in only 18 hours, the alien planet is 26 times closer to its parent star than Mercury ...
Jan 16, 2012 |
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The Helix Nebula in new colors
(PhysOrg.com) -- ESO's VISTA telescope, at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, has captured a striking new image of the Helix Nebula. This picture, taken in infrared light, reveals strands of cold nebular gas ...
Jan 19, 2012 |
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Radio telescopes capture best-ever snapshot of black hole jets (w/ video)
(PhysOrg.com) -- An international team, including NASA-funded researchers, using radio telescopes located throughout the Southern Hemisphere has produced the most detailed image of particle jets erupting from ...
May 21, 2011 |
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Youngest planet seen as it's forming
(PhysOrg.com) -- The first direct image of a planet in the process of forming around its star has been captured by astronomers who combined the power of the 10-meter Keck telescopes with a bit of optical sleight ...
Oct 19, 2011 |
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Kepler spacecraft discovers 'invisible world'
Usually, running five minutes late is a bad thing since you might lose your dinner reservation or miss out on tickets to the latest show. But when a planet runs five minutes late, astronomers get excited because ...
Sep 08, 2011 |
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New map of the universe reveals its history for the past six-billion years
The scientists of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), including astronomers at Penn State, have produced a new map of the universe that is in full color, covers more than one quarter of the entire sky, and ...
Jan 13, 2012 |
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Discovery that quasars don't show time dilation mystifies astronomers
(PhysOrg.com) -- The phenomenon of time dilation is a strange yet experimentally confirmed effect of relativity theory. One of its implications is that events occurring in distant parts of the universe should ...
Apr 09, 2010 |
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Eagle Nebula: A new view of an icon
(PhysOrg.com) -- The Eagle Nebula as never seen before. In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope's 'Pillars of Creation' image of the Eagle Nebula became one of the most iconic images of the 20th century. Now, ...
Jan 17, 2012 |
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Cosmic crashes forging gold: Nuclear reactions in space do produce the heaviest elements
(PhysOrg.com) -- Collisions of neutron stars produce the heaviest elements such as gold or lead. The cosmic site where the heaviest chemical elements such as lead or gold are formed has most likely been identified: ...
Sep 09, 2011 |
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Scientists release most accurate simulation of the universe to date
(PhysOrg.com) -- The Bolshoi supercomputer simulation, the most accurate and detailed large cosmological simulation run to date, gives physicists and astronomers a powerful new tool for understanding such ...
Sep 29, 2011 |
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Neutron star blows away models for thermonuclear explosions
(PhysOrg.com) -- Amsterdam astronomers have discovered a neutron star that confounds existing models for thermonuclear explosions in such extreme objects. In the case of the accreting pulsar IGR J17480-2446, ...
Sep 14, 2011 |
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'Darkest' world enlightens astronomers about mysterious light-gobbling planet
(PhysOrg.com) -- A giant Jupiter-like gas planet has been revealed to be the most light-thirsty object in the known universe -- a finding that may help astronomers better understand a mysterious characteristic ...
Sep 27, 2011 |
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Astrophysicists report first simulation to create a Milky Way-like galaxy
(PhysOrg.com) -- After nine months of number-crunching on a powerful supercomputer, a beautiful spiral galaxy matching our own Milky Way emerged from a computer simulation of the physics involved in galaxy ...
Aug 29, 2011 |
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Our galaxy might hold thousands of ticking 'time bombs'
(PhysOrg.com) -- In the Hollywood blockbuster "Speed," a bomb on a bus is rigged to blow up if the bus slows down below 50 miles per hour. The premise - slow down and you explode - makes for a great action ...
Sep 06, 2011 |
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