NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, only launched a couple of months ago, and has already done spectacular work. Gulping down huge tracts of sky every day, it has already discovered over 2000 asteroids — not seen, but actually discovered — including several that pass near the Earth (none on track to hit us,
Posted by Bad Astronomy
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage TeamMany people think that there have been a lot of big earthquakes in the past few months. In early January, a magnitude 7. 1 earthquake hit the Solomon Islands, causing a small tsunami. One week later, a magnitude 6. 5 earthquake hit just off the California coast. Two days after that, a magnitude 7. 0 earthquake in Haiti killed hundreds of thousands of people. The Chilean magnitude 8. 8 earthquake on February 27th was the 5th
Posted by Professor Astronomy's Astronomy Blog
... stars... and entire galaxies orbit supermassive black holes. As any astronomer (and probably quite a few school kids) will probably tell you, if you want to find a supermassive black hole, look in the centre of any sizeable galaxy. Well... Almost any sizeable galaxy. A colleague of mine was doing some reading around and found something quite interesting about one of t
Posted by Supernova Condensate
It goes by the super-catchy (not!) title "A Catalog of MIPSGAL Disk and Ring Sources". I chose it, over 213 competitors, because it's pure astronomy, and because it's something you don't need a PhD to be able to do, or even a BSc. Oh, and also because Don Mizuno and co-authors may have found two,
Posted by Universe Today
Have you heard of 'living fossils'? The coelacanth, the ginko tree, the platypus, and several others are species alive today which seem to be the same as those found as fossils, in rocks up to hundreds of millions of years old. Now combined results from the Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer, Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), and Swift
Posted by Universe Today
... the redshift of the galaxies, ranging from redshift of 0. 2 (blue) to 1 (red). Pink x-ray contours show the extended x-ray emission as observed by XMM-Newton. Dark matter (actually cold, dark – non-baryonic – matter) can be detected only by its gravitational influence. In
Posted by Universe Today
Every now and again I think I've pretty much seen it all when it comes to astronomical images, and I'm getting jaded. And then I see a picture like this:Yeah, I still get a thrill from seeing things like this! Click to massively embiggen. The image shows what's called the Hickson Compact Group 31, a small
Posted by Bad Astronomy
At the end of the proverbial day, space-based missions like Spitzer produce millions of observations of astronomical objects, phenomena, and events. And those terabytes of data are used to test hypotheses in astrophysics which lead to a deeper understanding of the universe and our home in it, and perhaps some breakthrough whose here-on-the-ground implementation leads
Posted by Universe Today
... make stars? Or were galaxies back then more efficient at star-making? Or something else??Dr. Linda Tacconi, from Germany's Max-Planck-Institut fr extraterrestrische Physik, led an
Posted by Universe Today
Why do some of the supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei create back-to-back jets that can vaporize entire solar systems, while others have no jets at all?Dan Evans, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI) thinks he knows why; it's because the jet-producing supermassive black holes are spinning
Posted by Universe Today
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