New Haven, Conn. — While sorting through hundreds of galaxy images as part of the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project two years ago, Dutch schoolteacher and volunteer astronomer Hanny van Arkel stumbled upon a strange-looking object that baffl…
New research by a University of Victoria PhD student is challenging popular theory about how part of our solar system formed. At today’s meeting of the prestigious Division of Planetary Sciences in Pasadena, California, Alex Parker is presenting evi…
ALBUQUERQUE, NM — Two amateur astronomers who independently observed and videotaped an asteroid striking the giant planet Jupiter on June 3 have opened the possibility, in effect, of a giant research lab in space for planetary scientists.
Accor…
The existence of Dark Matter particles in the Sun’s interior seems inevitable, despite dark matter never having been observed (there or elsewhere), despite intensive ongoing searches. Once gravitationally captured by the Sun, these particles tend to…
AMES, Iowa — The Spitzer Space Telescope is now taking aim at the outer reaches of the Milky Way and helping two Iowa State University astronomers advance their star studies.
Massimo Marengo, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy,…
Tight double-star systems might not be the best places for life to spring up, according to a new study using data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The infrared observatory spotted a surprisingly large amount of dust around three mature, close-…
Until now, astronomers haven’t been able to offer a full explanation for why the Milky Way and other galaxies produce new stars at a relative snail’s pace. While they have known for decades that high turbulence keeps huge clouds of hydrogen gas from condensing into stars, they haven’t identified all the causes of the galactic perturbations. In a coming report researchers in San Diego say they have discovered that a well-known, but overlooked source of heating?regular outbursts of ultraviolet radiation from clusters of very large, bright stars?may play a significant role in keeping the Milky Way’s gas continually stirred up.
An extrasolar planet has been discovered using a new technique that will allow astronomers to detect planets no other current method can. Planets around other stars have been previously detected only by the effect they have on their parent star, limiting the observations to large, Jupiter-like planets and those in very tight orbits. The new method uses the patterns created in the dust surrounding a star to discern the presence of a planet that could be as small as Earth or in an orbit so wide that it would take hundreds of years to observe its effect on its star.