(PhysOrg.com) -- At this very moment one of the fastest spacecraft ever launched -- NASA
Astronomers have made an important breakthrough in the understanding of how pulsars work. Using a new inverse mapping or reverse engineering approach, researchers were able to establish for the first time that most of the light from the pulsar comes from close to the star
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 almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, with only remarkably small amounts of other chemical elements in it. This intriguing composition places it in the “forbidden zone” of a widely accepted theory of star formation, meaning that it should never have come into existence in the first place. The results will appear in the 1 September 2011 issue of the journal Nature.
After nine months of number-crunching on a powerful supercomputer, a beautiful spiral galaxy matching our own Milky Way has emerged from a computer
A green thumb and a little flair as a gourmet chef may be among the key skills for the first men and women who travel to the Red Planet later this century, according to one scientist.
A galaxy with a combination of characteristics never seen before is giving astronomers a tantalizing peek at processes they believe played key roles in the growth of galaxies and clusters of galaxies early in the history of the Universe. The galaxy, dubbed Speca by the team of researchers, is only the second spiral, as opposed to elliptical, galaxy known to produce large, powerful jets of subatomic particles moving at nearly the speed of light. It also is one of only two galaxies to show that such activity occurred in three separate episodes.
A supernova discovered Wednesday is closer to Earth -- approximately 21 million light years away -- than any other of its kind in a generation. Astronomers believe they caught the supernova within hours of its explosion -- a rare feat for events of this type.
New research using a technique that measures the isotopes of lead and neodymium in lunar crustal rocks shows that the moon and Earth may be millions of years younger than originally thought.
Large cosmic structures made up of dark and normal matter evolve along the same lines -- this is one of the most important conclusions emerging from the latest computer simulations.
(PhysOrg.com) -- The center of our Milky Way galaxy is about 27,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius. At the very center of the galaxy lies a black hole whose mass is about four million solar masses. Around it is a donut-shaped structure about eight light-years across that rings the inner volume of neutral gas and an estimated thousands of individual stars. Around that, stretching out to 700 light-years, is a dense molecular zone of activity, unique to the galaxy, with massive star forming clusters of luminous stars, giant molecular clouds, and many more, poorly understood regions as well.
On August 9, 2011 at 3:48 a.m. EDT, the sun emitted an Earth-directed X6.9 flare, as measured by the NOAA GOES satellite. This was the largest flare of
(PhysOrg.com) -- One of the biggest unsolved problems in astrophysics is that galaxies and galaxy clusters rotate faster than expected, given the amount of existing baryonic (normal) matter. The fast orbits require a larger central mass than the nearby stars, dust, and other baryonic objects can provide, leading scientists to propose that every galaxy resides in a halo of (as yet undetectable) dark matter made of non-baryonic particles. As one of many scientists who have become somewhat skeptical of dark matter, CERN physicist Dragan Slavkov Hajdukovic has proposed that the illusion of dark matter may be caused by the gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum.
Check out Ten Mind-Blowing Solar Views from the SDO: Photos
A University of Sydney researcher was part of an international team of astronomers that has observed an incredibly rare event that occurs once every 10,000 years per galaxy.
