The cosmic cauldron has brewed up a Halloween trick in the form of a ghostly face that glows in X-rays, as seen by ESA’s XMM-Newton space telescope. The eerie entity is a bubble bursting with the fiery stellar wind of a ‘live fast, die young’ star.
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A giant bubble blown by the massive Wolf-Rayet star HD 50896, the pink star …
An international team of astronomers has caught a star in the act of devouring one of its planets. BD+48 740, a red giant they observed using the 9.2-meter Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas, appears to have the fumes of a scorched planet in its atmosphere. This is consistent with a rocky world, recently destroyed.
Could the same … Read the rest of this article
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has tracked the aftermath of a rare massive storm on Saturn. Data reveal record-setting disturbances in the planet’s upper atmosphere long after the visible signs of the storm abated, in addition to an indication the storm was more forceful than scientists previously thought.
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This false-color mosaic from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows the tail of Saturn’s huge northern …
he heat-seeking capabilities of the international Cassini spacecraft and two ground-based telescopes have provided the first look at the aftermath of Saturn’s ‘Great Springtime Storm’. Concealed from the naked eye, a giant oval vortex is persisting long after the visible effects of the storm subsided.
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Series of images tracking the development of Saturn’s giant storm, as seen at visible wavelengths …
A new study using data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope suggests a cause for the mysterious glow of infrared light seen across the entire sky. It comes from isolated stars beyond the edges of galaxies. These stars are thought to have once belonged to the galaxies before violent galaxy mergers stripped them away into the relatively empty space outside of … Read the rest of this article
NASA’s newest set of X-ray eyes in the sky, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), has caught its first look at the giant black hole parked at the center of our galaxy. The observations show the typically mild-mannered black hole during the middle of a flare-up.
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NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has captured these first, focused views of …
A comprehensive study of hundreds of galaxies observed by the Keck telescopes in Hawaii and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has revealed an unexpected pattern of change that extends back 8 billion years, or more than half the age of the universe.
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A study of 544 star-forming galaxies observed by the Keck and Hubble telescopes shows that disk galaxies like our …
Earth’s Grand Canyon inspires awe for anyone who casts eyes upon the vast river-cut valley, but it would seem nothing more than a scratch next to the cavernous scar of Valles Marineris that marks the face of Mars.
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Valles Marineris, seen at an angle of 45 degrees to the surface in near-true colour and with four times vertical exaggeration. The …
AAVSO Alert Notice 472:Dr. Noel Richardson (Universite de Montreal, formerly at Georgia State University) has requested monitoring of the Small Magellanic Cloud eclipsing binary HD 5980 (in Tucana) as part of a multiwavelength campaign he is coordinating to study this unusual system. Dr. Richardson writes:
“HD 5980 is … Read the rest of this article
Astronomers searching for Earthlike worlds need look no further than Alpha Centauri, the stellar system next door it seems.
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The video above shows a fly-through of the bright double star Alpha Centauri A and B. In the final sequence we close in on Alpha Centauri B and a newly discovered planet swims into view. This Earth-mass planet is the closest …
The Sun Now (Visible light)
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The Sun Now (H-Alpha light)
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Aurora Oval
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Aurora Oval
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