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Trio Of Neptunes And Their Belt |
| Using the ultra-precise HARPS spectrograph on ESO's 3.6-m telescope at La Silla (Chile), a team of European astronomers have discovered that a nearby star is host to three Neptune-mass planets. The innermost planet is most probably rocky, while the outermost is the first known Neptune-mass planet to reside in the habitable zone. This unique system is likely further enriched by an asteroid belt - European Southern Observatory |
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NASA's Space Shuttle Discovery Moves To Launch Pad |
| The Space Shuttle Discovery stands at its launch pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla. The shuttle arrived at 8:30 p.m. EDT Friday [May 19th] on top of a giant vehicle known as the crawler transporter - NASA |
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ESA’s New Camera Follows Disintegration Of A Comet |
| The continuing disintegration of Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 has allowed ESA scientists to see into the interior of the comet. Using a revolutionary camera attached to the ESA Optical Ground Station on Tenerife, they have followed the detailed twists and turns of various comet fragments - ESA |
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Distant 'Earths' Will Only Be Seen From Space |
| A sophisticated new simulation reveals how big extrasolar planets must be to hope to see them from the ground – at least the size of Jupiter - New Scientist |
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Astronomers Use Innovative Technique To Find Extrasolar Planet |
| An international team of professional and amateur astronomers, using simple off-the-shelf equipment to trawl the skies for planets outside our solar system, has hauled in its first "catch." The astronomers discovered a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a Sun-like star 600
light-years from Earth in the constellation Corona Borealis. The team, led by Peter McCullough of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., includes four amateur astronomers from North America and Europe - Space Telescope Science Institute |
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Spacecraft Collision Due To Catalogue Of Errors |
| NASA's DART craft – which crashed into a satellite instead of autonomously docking with it – suffered serious problems with its navigation systems - New Scientist |
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A Ruler To Measure The Universe |
| A team of astronomers led by Nikhil Padmanabhan and David Schlegel has published the largest three-dimensional map of the universe ever constructed, a wedge-shaped slice of the cosmos that spans a tenth of the northern sky, encompasses 600,000 uniquely luminous red galaxies, and extends 5.6 billion light-years deep into space, equivalent to 40 percent of the way back in time to the Big Bang - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory |
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MAGIC Discovers Variable Very High Energy Gamma-Ray Emission From A Microquasar |
| Today [May 18th], in Science Magazine, the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) Telescope reports the discovery of variable very high energy (VHE) gamma-ray
emission from a microquasar - Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona |
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When Dwarfs Gave Way To Giants |
| The first galaxies were small - about 10,000 times less massive than the Milky Way. Billions of years ago, those mini-furnaces forged a multitude of hot, massive stars. In
the process, they sowed the seeds for their own destruction by bathing the universe in ultraviolet radiation. According to theory, that radiation shut off further dwarf galaxy
formation by both ionizing and heating surrounding hydrogen gas. Now, astronomers Stuart Wyithe (University of Melbourne) and Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center
for Astrophysics) are presenting direct evidence in support of this theory - Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics |
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Looking For Aliens On The Moon |
| When astronauts return to the Moon, they should keep their eyes peeled for extraterrestrial artefacts just in case, an astronomer argues - New Scientist |
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