When physicists probe the mysteries of plasma, the fourth state of matter, they often discover phenomena of striking beauty. Much as when the Hubble Space Telescope sent back vivid images from space of ionized gas clouds (an interstellar plasm…
Astronomers are used to looking millions of years into the past. Now scientists have used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to look thousands of years into the future. Looking at the heart of Omega Centauri, a globular cluster in the Milky…
Beyond the orbit of Neptune reside countless icy rocks known as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). One of the biggest, Pluto, is classified as a dwarf planet. The region also supplies us with comets such as famous Comet Halley. Most TNOs are small …
progressive increase in the brightness of the planet Neptune suggests that, like Earth, the distant planet has seasons. Observations of Neptune made during a six-year period with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope by a group of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) show that the planet is exhibiting a significant increase in brightness. The changes, observed mostly in the planet’s southern hemisphere, show a distinct increase in the amount and brightness of the banded cloud features that are a distinctive feature of the planet.
Astronomers from Cardiff University are involved in a race against time to uncover the hidden secrets of the Universe. The team, from the Department of Physics and Astronomy, are completing the very first survey for cosmic hydrogen – the primeval gas which emerged from the Big Bang to form all the stars and galaxies we can see today.
In January 2002, a moderately dim star in the constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn, suddenly became 600 000 times more luminous than our Sun. This made it temporarily the brightest star in our Milky Way. The light from this eruption created a unique phenomenon known as a ‘light echo’ when it reflected off dust shells around the star.
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have, for the first time, observed the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet evaporating into space. Much of this planet may eventually disappear, leaving only a dense core. It is a type of extrasolar planet known as a ‘hot Jupiter’. These giant gaseous planets orbit their stars very closely, drawn to them like moths to a flame. The scorched planet called HD 209458b orbits ‘only’ 7 million kilometres from its yellow Sun-like star. By comparison, Jupiter, the closest gas giant in our Solar System, orbits 780 million kilometres from our Sun. NASA/ESA Hubble Space telescope observations reveal a hot and puffed-up evaporating hydrogen atmosphere surrounding the planet. This huge envelope of hydrogen resembles a comet with a tail trailing behind the planet. Earth also has an extended atmosphere of escaping hydrogen gas, but the loss rate is much lower.
Astronomers have successfully tested a new method to remove atmospheric blurring from large ground based telescopes. The experiments were made in November 2002 and January 2003 at the 6.5-meter (21-foot) telescope at the MMT Observatory on Mount Hopkins, Ariz. The project is a collaboration of the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory and Italy’s Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri in Florence. It uses revolutionary new technology developed with support from the U.S. Air Force.
A major technical advance in astronomy is making it possible for scientists to see individual living cells of the human retina clearly for the first time. This will greatly improve doctors’ ability to diagnose diseases of the retina such as glaucoma at an early stage, when intervention and treatment can prevent blindness.
A team of astronomers is using one of the most advanced ground-based telescopes in the world to “zoom-in” on protostars in the Orion Nebula, revealing in unprecedented detail a variety of phenomena associated with star and planet formation in the presence of extremely massive, luminous stars. These phenomena include high-velocity jets of gas launched from the protostars themselves; evaporation flows driven by the intense radiation of nearby massive stars; and colliding winds that form thin, filamentary sheets of gas.
Giant jets of subatomic particles moving at nearly the speed of light have been found coming from thousands of galaxies across the Universe, but always from elliptical galaxies or galaxies in the process of merging — until now. Using the combined power of the Hubble Space Telescope, the Very Large Array (VLA) and the 8-meter Gemini-South Telescope, astronomers have discovered a huge jet coming from a spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way.