News

VLT Interferometer Studies the Inner Region of Circumstellar Discs

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has obtained definitive evidence that a distant quasar formed less than a billion years after the big bang contains a fully-grown supermassive black hole generating energy at the rate of twenty trillion suns. The existence of such massive black holes at this early epoch of the Universe challenges theories of the formation of galaxies and supermassive black holes...

Edwin Powell Hubble was born in Marshfield, Missouri on this day in l889. We’re talking about the Rhodes Scholar Hubble who studied Roman and English Law at Queens College, Oxford and then practiced law for a year in Louisville, Kentucky.

When looking at a massive launch vehicle or aircraft, it’s hard to imagine that a problem with one tiny wire could paralyze its performance. To reduce processing delays and ensure safe and sound performance, Kennedy Space Center technology experts invented the Standing Wave Reflectometer (SWR).

While analyzing NASA Hubble Space Telescope images of the Sagittarius dwarf irregular galaxy (SagDIG), an international team of astronomers led by Simone Marchi, Yazan Momany, and Luigi Bedin were surprised to see the trail of a faint asteroid that had drifted across the field of view during the exposures. The trail is seen as a series of 13 arcs on the right in this August 2003 Advanced Camera for Surveys image.

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope to study the most distant known quasar have found a tantalizing clue that may answer a longstanding cosmic chicken-and-egg question: which came first, supermassive black holes or giant galaxies?

"Unveiling Titan is like reading a mystery novel," said Dr. Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and team leader for the radar instrument on Cassini. "Each time you flip the page you learn something new, but you don't know the whole story until you've read the whole book. The story of Titan is unfolding right before our eyes, and what we are seeing is intriguing."

This week's winning review compares an Orion 80mm f/7.5 ED Apochromatic Refractor with a Masked 80mm Televue 102 Apochromatic Refractor.

See Aurora Now!!!!!!! Maybe tomorrow and the next day too!

A team of UK astronomers working with international partners has produced the first ever image of an astronomical object using high energy gamma rays, helping to solve a 100 year old mystery - the origin of cosmic rays. Their research, published in the Journal Nature on November 4th, was carried out using the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.), an array of four telescopes, in Namibia, South-West Africa...

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) have overcome longstanding technical hurdles to map the sky at little-explored radio frequencies that may provide a tantalizing look deep into the early Universe. The scientists have released images and data covering half of the sky visible from the VLA, and hope to complete their survey within a year.

An Open University research student will reveal her findings on what caused one of the world’s ‘Big Five’ mass extinctions at the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting in Denver, USA, this month.

Hubble Spots Rare Triple Eclipse on Jupiter

Making an extra effort to image a faint, gigantic corkscrew traced by fast protons and electrons shot out from a mysterious microquasar paid off for a pair of astrophysicists who gained new insights into the beast's inner workings and also resolved a longstanding dispute over the object's distance.

An international team of astronomers is announcing today that they have identified the probable surviving companion star to a titanic supernova explosion witnessed in the year 1572 by the great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe and other astronomers of that era.