Hubble has given astronomers their clearest view yet of ISON, a newly-discovered sun-grazer comet that could light up the sky later this year. Astronomers are keenly interested in ISON as it offers a rare opportunity to witness a comet’s evolution as it makes its first-ever journey through the inner solar system. ISON, like all comets, […]
A new analysis of conditions after a Manhattan-sized asteroid slammed into Mexico in the dinosaur era indicates the event triggered a global firestorm that would have burned every twig, bush and tree on Earth and led to the extinction of 80 percent of all Earth’s species. The new research, from the University of Colorado Boulder, […]
After five years of work, a team of scientists from Iowa State University are proposing a $500 million test launch of an asteroid interception system. Led by Bong Wie, of the university’s Asteroid Deflection Research Center, the team will be presenting their research at NASA’s Technology Day on the Hill, next month in Washington, D.C. […]
A new experiment simulating conditions in deep space has shown that linked pairs of amino acids – essential building blocks shared by all living things – could have been created on icy interplanetary dust and then carried to Earth where they jump-started life. Details of the experiment are reported in The Astrophysical Journal. The discovery, […]
Imagine a sphere more than 2 million miles across spinning so fast that its surface is traveling at nearly the speed of light. Such an object exists: the supermassive black hole at the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 1365. Astronomers measured its astonishing spin-rate using data from the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and […]
Detecting extraterrestrial life from tell-tale atmospheric signatures is much easier to do when the planet under observation is orbiting a dying star, say Harvard Smithsonian scientists who believe that white dwarf systems are the best candidates for catching our first glimpse of life outside our solar system. Explaining their reasoning in Monthly Notices of the […]
Russia’s Ria Novosti news agency has reported that Russian scientists have located fragments from the meteor that broke up dramatically over Chelyabinsk on Friday. The area, about 900 miles east of Moscow, is home to factories, a nuclear power plant and an atomic waste storage centre. The shockwave blew out windows in more than 4,000 […]
The Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes have teamed up to uncover a mysterious infant star that behaves like a strobe light, a phenomenon that astronomers think is caused by periodic interactions between two newly formed stars that are gravitationally bound to each other. Every 25.34 days, the object (located 950 light-years from Earth and designated […]
A new analysis of data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope indicates that many red dwarf stars have habitable, Earth-sized planets, raising the prospect that the closest Earth-like planet could be just 13 light-years away. Red dwarf stars are smaller, cooler, and fainter than our Sun. An average red dwarf is only one-third as large and […]
Astronomers say they have spotted evidence for an asteroid belt encircling Vega, a star 25 lights years from Earth and the second brightest in the northern sky. The new observations that utilized the Spitzer and Herschel telescopes hint that Vega could be much like our own solar system and may contain Earth-like planets. The discovery, […]
