News
The Milky Way Galaxy is Warped
UMass and Berkeley astrophysicists belive that two of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies - the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds - are interacting with dark matter in the Milky Way to create a mysterious warp in our galactic disk. The warp, which extends across the entire 200,000-light year diameter of the galaxy, has been described by the researchers in terms of a rather simple mathematical model.
New Horizons is on a Fast Track to Pluto
The New Horizons spacecraft will cross the entire 3 billion mile span of the solar system and conduct flyby studies of Pluto and Charon in 2015. NASA's most powerful launcher, the Atlas 5, rocketed the spacecraft away from Earth at a record 36,000 miles per hour. At that speed, and with a "gravity slingshot assist" it will get from Jupiter in 2007, the spacecraft will take over 9 years to reach Pluto.
Vanderbuilt Astronomers Map the Star Forming Winds of M42 -- the Orion Nebula
Located at a distance of about 1,600 light years from Earth, the Orion Nebula is the brightest diffuse nebula in the sky and is visible to the naked eye. Utilizing new data from the Hubble Space Telescope, Vanderbuilt University astronomers have been mapping the winds blowing in M42 to get a better idea of how stellar forming currents are incubating new stars.
The World’s Most Famous Equation Turned 100 in 2005... and Now it is Proven Accurate to One Part in a Million
In 1905 Albert Einstein published three landmark papers that revolutionized our understanding of the Universe -- papers on Brownian motion, the Photoelectric Effect, and Special Relativity. The most famous formula in science, E=mc(squared), turned 100 years old in 2005. To mark the occasion, 2005 was designated by the United Nations as the International Year of Physics. Now, physicists at MIT, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US, and the Institute Laue Langevin (ILL) in France have determined that the formula predicting that energy and mass are equivalent is correct to an incredible accuracy of better than one part in a million.
Cornell Astronomers Ask: What Happens When Worlds Collide?
In about five billion years, the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies will collide much like the two galaxies NGC 4038 and NGC 4039 in this image, which are known as the Antennae Galaxies. Most of the hundreds of billions of stars in each of the galaxies will never actually collide, but will pass rather freely between each other with little damage. This however, will not be the case for the interstellar matter consisting largely of clouds of debris, dust, and gas. The high relative velocities and pressures between the interacting interstellar clouds will pull, twist, and distort the two galaxies and trigger a firestorm of star formation.
XMM-Newton Detects Debris Circling a Black Hole at One Tenth the Speed of Light
Astrophysicists from the University of Oxford, using the European Space Agency (ESA) XMM (X-ray Multi-Mirror) Newton Observatory, have been able to trace gas and debris on a complete journey around a massive black hole, clocking it at one tenth the speed of light as it swirls around the accretion disk.
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