University of Chicago astronomers established their first in a series of telescopes at the South Pole in 1986. Chicago scientists have since become a fixture of the South Pole, which enters its second century of human activity.
Boise State University engineering researchers have developed and tested a miniature plasma source for a micro-propulsion system that could help move small satellites and enable them to maintain a position while in orbit.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has passed another milestone in its 21 years of exploration: the 10,000th refereed science paper has been published. This makes Hubble one of the most prolific astronomical endeavors in history.
A planet made of diamonds may sound lovely, but you wouldn’t want to live there. A new study suggests that some stars in the Milky Way could harbor “carbon super-Earths” – giant terrestrial planets with up to 50 percent diamond.
Beginning the first week of December, the Radiation Belt Storm Probes will embark on a space environment test campaign that will last into March 2012.
An international team of astronomers using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope have found the fastest spinning star ever discovered. This massive bright young star, called VFTS 102, rotates at a dizzying 1 million miles per hour.
Jean-Loup Bertaux, a researcher at Boston University’s Center for Space Physics, is a member of an international team of astronomers who have detected for the first time ultraviolet (UV) emissions of neutral hydrogen within the Earth’s own galaxy, the Milky Way.
An otherwise nondescript binary star system in the Whirlpool Galaxy has brought astronomers tantalizingly close to their goal of observing a star just before it goes supernova.
Secure World Foundation (SWF) brought together on November 22 leading authorities to participate in a debate on Galileo - its current status and future opportunities.
In 2008, the Italian satellite PAMELA detected a curious excess of antimatter positrons – a startling discovery that could have been a sign of the existence of dark matter. With assistance from the Earth's magnetic field, the Fermi Gamma-ray Telescope confirms a cosmic excess of antimatter positrons, but not the spike expected if evidence of dark matter.
A new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows globular cluster NGC 1846, a spherical collection of hundreds of thousands of stars in the outer halo of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
European Space Governance: The Outlook is an informative and instructive publication, one that aims to provide decision-makers with references and policy-oriented suggestions for the immediate future.
Starting from the behavior of small flames in the laboratory, a team of researchers has gained new insights into the titanic forces that drive Type Ia supernova explosions. These stellar explosions are important tools for studying the evolution of the universe, so a better understanding of how they behave would help answer some of the fundamental questions in astronomy.
Images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show sand dunes and ripples moving across the surface of Mars. These observations reveal the planet's sandy surface is more dynamic than previously thought.
The formation and collapse of bubbles within fluids can be a big engineering problem. Called cavitation, the process may erode vital pieces of mechanical equipment such as turbines or propellers. Seeking to better understand the dynamics of cavitation bubbles within liquid drops, the EPFL team created this type of bubble in microgravity conditions aboard the ESA parabolic flight.
New details about the birth of a famous black hole that took place millions of years ago have been uncovered, thanks to a team of scientists who used data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory as well as from radio, optical and other X-ray telescopes.
A new, high-precision spectrograph orbiting Earth aboard the Hubble Space Telescope is sending such rich data to Earth, some astronomers feel they’ve crossed the final frontier in understanding galaxy evolution, the birthplaces of stars. Until now, most of the mass in a galaxy was undetectable.
New observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope are expanding astronomers' understanding of the ways in which galaxies continuously recycle immense volumes of hydrogen gas and heavy elements to build successive generations of stars stretching over billions of years. This ongoing recycling keeps galaxies from emptying their "fuel tanks" and stretches their star-forming epoch to over 10 billion years.
Scientists from Lockheed Martin and NASA conducted research to find out the potential shelf of food products packaged in retort pouches (a flexible package in which prepared food is hermetically sealed for long-term unrefrigerated storage) in order to determine the suitability of these foods to support long-duration (three-to-five years) spaceflights.
A team of workshop participants, including journalists and writers, hazard communication authorities, artists and Near Earth Object (NEO) researchers, met at the University of Colorado, Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP).
Nature paper details potential new habitat for life on Jupiter’s icy moon.
NASA has announced that it will extend the MESSENGER mission for an additional year of orbital operations at Mercury beyond the planned end of the primary mission on March 17, 2012. The MESSENGER probe became the first spacecraft to orbit the innermost planet on March 18, 2011.
Using its near-infrared vision to peer 9 billion years back in time, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered an extraordinary population of tiny, young galaxies that are brimming with star formation. The galaxies are typically a hundred times less massive than the Milky Way galaxy, yet they churn out stars at such a furious pace that their stellar content would double in just 10 million years. By comparison, the Milky Way would take a thousand times longer to double its population.
The greatest astronomical discovery of the 20th century may have been credited to the wrong person. But it turns out to have been nobody's fault except for that of the actual original discoverer himself. Writing in the Nov. 10th issue of the journal Nature, astrophysicist Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute has put to bed a growing conspiracy theory about who was fairly credited for discovering the expanding universe.
For 520 days, space researchers collected data on the impact of prolonged operational confinement on the sleep, performance, and mood on humans during a simulated Mars mission that ended last week in Moscow. The research could provide valuable insight for future long-duration space missions.
Experts at Secure World Foundation are available to discuss this asteroid flyby today and the future of maintaining a vigilant eye on Near Earth Objects (NEOs), as well as establishing a Planetary Defense strategy.
In work that could help advance astronomers' understanding of dark matter, University of Michigan researchers have discovered two additional dwarf galaxies that appear to be satellites of Andromeda, the closest spiral galaxy to Earth.
Secure World Foundation and the Mission of Canada to the European Union partnered to organize the 2011 Space Security Index Launch in Europe. Discussions at the space policy round table focused on significant global activities within outer space, with a particular emphasis on Europe, driven by a number of important occurrences in the space sector. The event centered on the issuing of the 2011 Space Security Index (SSI).
Experts at Secure World Foundation are available to discuss the November 8 close flyby of Earth by an asteroid and the future of maintaining a vigilant eye on Near Earth Objects (NEOs), as well as establishing a Planetary Defense strategy.
Scientists within the New York Center for Astrobiology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have compiled years of research to help locate areas in outer space that have extreme potential for complex organic molecule formation. The scientists searched for methanol, a key ingredient in the synthesis of organic molecules that could lead to life. Their results have implications for determining the origins of molecules that spark life in the cosmos.
A new analysis of Hubble surveys, combined with simulations of galaxy interactions, reveals that the merger rate of galaxies over the last 8 billion to 9 billion years falls between the previous estimates.
For the first time, astronomers have detected around a burgeoning solar system a sprawling cloud of water vapor that's cold enough to form comets, which could eventually deliver oceans to dry planets.
Since 1995, scientists have discovered approximately 600 planets around other stars, including 50 planets last month alone, and one that orbits two stars, like Tatooine in Star Wars. Detection of the first Earthlike planet remains elusive, however, and now the University of Chicago joins the search.
This image of galaxy cluster MACS 1206 is part of the broad survey with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The apparently distorted shapes in the galaxy cluster are distant galaxies from which the light is bent by the gravitational pull of dark matter, an invisible material within the cluster of galaxies. MACS J1206 has been observed as part of the new CLASH survey of galaxy clusters.
The space between the galaxies wasn't always transparent. In the earliest times, it was an opaque, dense fog. How it cleared is an important question in astronomy. New observational evidence from the University of Michigan shows how high energy light from massive stars could have been responsible.
Baltimore's Maryland Science Center is going to be the "landing site" for the full-scale model of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, and it's free for all to see. The Webb telescope life-sized model is as big as a tennis court, and it's coming to the Maryland Science Center at Baltimore's Inner Harbor from October 14 through October 26, 2011.
In the Crab Nebula, in the constellation Taurus, a remnant of an exploded star has astrophysicists scratching their heads, reassessing their theories about gamma rays — the highest-energy form of light, generated by subatomic particles moving close to the speed of light.
In the Pinwheel Galaxy some 21 light years from Earth, a supernova beams brightly, out-shining its cosmic neighbors and causing a stir among starwatchers. Students in University of Delaware Prof. Judi Provencal’s Observational Astronomy class (PHYS 469) photographed the exploding star last week using the telescope at Mt. Cuba Astronomical Observatory in Greenville, Del., which has a lens spanning 24 inches in diameter.
The VERITAS array of telescopes has detected pulsed gamma rays from the pulsar at the heart of the Crab Nebula that have energies far higher than the common theoretical models can explain. The finding is one of the most exciting in the telescope’s history, say consortium members at Washington University in St. Louis.
Researchers at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) are proposing a new space-based monitoring system called Earth’s Radiation Imbalance System, or ERIS, that would provide the most detailed data ever about the real reasons behind observed climate change.
Iowa State University researchers helped design and build the $20 million instrument that allowed astrophysicists to discover the first very-high-energy gamma rays from a pulsar. The discovery is reported in the Oct. 7 issue of the journal Science.
In a painstaking re-analysis of Hubble Space Telescope images from 1998, astronomers have found visual evidence for two extrasolar planets that went undetected back then. Finding these hidden gems in the Hubble archive gives astronomers an invaluable time machine for comparing much earlier planet orbital motion data to more recent observations. It also demonstrates a novel approach for planet hunting in archival Hubble data.
Adam Riess, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, today was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The academy recognized him for leadership in the High-z Team's 1998 discovery that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating, a phenomenon widely attributed to a mysterious, unexplained "dark energy" filling the universe.
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 cosmic mysteries as galaxy formation, dark matter, and dark energy.
Experts are available to discuss the re-entry of NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS).
As a 20-year-old NASA satellite prepares to return to Earth and scatter space debris over a wide area, space debris expert Dr. William Schonberg is available to talk to media about the issue. Schonberg is chair of civil, architectural and environmental engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology and is part of a National Research Council panel that studies the impact of space debris.
Beginning on Sunday, September 25 an outdoor laser exhibit at the Maryland Science Center will present a unique blend of astronomy and art. Hubble spectral observations of distant galaxies will be projected onto the Maryland Science Center with an intense green laser. Educational activities will allow students to explore the world of light and color in astronomy.
Worried about being hit by NASA’s UARS satellite? You probably shouldn’t lose too much sleep about it, according to an Indiana University of Pennsylvania geoscientist. “Compared to the other perils of everyday life (such as riding in a car) the hazard is very minor for us on the ground, but space junk is a much greater problem in orbit, where collisions can cause considerable damage to a satellite or spacecraft," Dr. Kenneth Coles says.
The uncontrolled re-entry of NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) is now expected to occur this Friday, September 23 - plus or minus a day.
Three prominent researchers discuss how recent findings from the Kepler mission are deepening our knowledge of planets beyond our solar system, as well as redefining the boundaries where life could exist.
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