Astronomers are actively hunting a class of supermassive black holes throughout the universe called blazars thanks to data collected by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). The mission has revealed more than 200 blazars and has the potential to find thousands more.
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This artist’s concept shows a “feeding,” or active, supermassive black hole with a jet streaming outward at nearly …
ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory has studied the dusty belt around the nearby star Fomalhaut. The dust appears to be coming from collisions that destroy up to thousands of icy comets every day.
Herschel’s image of Fomalhaut
Fomalhaut is a young star, just a few hundred million years old, and twice as massive as the Sun. Its dust belt was discovered … Read the rest of this article
AAVSO Alert Notice 457Dr. Michael Rupen (National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Socorro, NM) has informed us that he and his colleagues of the EVLA (Expanded Very Large Array) Nova Team are carrying out a multiwavelength campaign on the Fe II-type nova Nova Oph 2012. They have triggered observations with Swift, … Read the rest of this article
The latest images released from ESA’s Mars Express reveal a series of ‘pit-chains’ on the flanks of one of the largest volcanoes in the Solar System. Depending on their origin, they might be tempting targets in the search for microbial life on the Red Planet.
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Tractus Catena is shown here in a computer generated perspective view. The image was created …
ESA astronaut André Kuipers has installed ‘NightPod’ on the International Space Station, an aid for taking night-time pictures of Earth. The first batch of pictures offer stunning images of cities at night.
Melbourne, Australia, at night taken by ESA astronaut André Kuipers from the International Space Station with the NightPod camera aid. Credits: ESA/NASA
Any amateur photographer knows the problems … Read the rest of this article
NASA is extending three missions affiliated with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. — Kepler, the Spitzer Space Telescope and the U.S. portion of the European Space Agency’s Planck mission — as a result of the 2012 Senior Review of Astrophysics Missions.
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From left to right, artist’s concepts of the Spitzer, Planck and Kepler space telescopes. NASA extended Spitzer …
Two of ESA’s space observatories have combined to create a multi-wavelength view of violent events taking place within the giant galaxy of Centaurus A. The new observations strengthen the view that it may have been created by the cataclysmic collision of two older galaxies.
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The peculiar galaxy Centaurus A in the far-infrared and X-rays. Inner structural features seen in this …
Supernova explosions and the jets of a monstrous black hole are scattering a galaxy’s star-making gas like a cosmic leaf blower, a new study finds. The findings, which relied on ultraviolet observations from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer and a host of other instruments, fill an important gap in the current understanding of galactic evolution.
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Time is running out for the …
As ESA’s Envisat satellite marks ten years in orbit, it continues to observe the rapid retreat of one of Antarctica’s ice shelves due to climate warming.
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This animation shows radar images from the Envisat satellite from 2002 to 2012 of the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica. Over the last decade, the ice shelf has disintegrated by 1790 sq km. …
AAVSO Alert Notice 456Dr. Bram Ochsendorf (Leiden Observatory, Belgium) has requested monitoring by AAVSO observers of the R CrB variable V854 Cen in support of observations to be made using the XSHOOTER instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla Paranal Observatory in Chile. Dr. … Read the rest of this article
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The Sun Now (H-Alpha light)
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Aurora Oval
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