Space Science News

Young Stars at Home in Ancient Cluster
Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - 10:19

Looking like a hoard of gems fit for an emperor's collection, this deep sky object called NGC 6752 is in fact far more worthy of admiration. It is a globular cluster, and at over 10 billion years old is one the most ancient collections of stars known. It has been blazing for well over twice as long as our solar system has existed.

 

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VLT Takes Most Detailed Infrared Image of the Carina Nebula
Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - 09:05

ESO’s Very Large Telescope has delivered the most detailed infrared image of the Carina Nebula stellar nursery taken so far. Many previously hidden features, scattered across a spectacular celestial landscape of gas, dust and young stars, have emerged. This is one of the most dramatic images ever created by the VLT.
Deep in the heart of the southern Milky Way lies a stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula.

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Black holes: Giving life as well as dealing death
Sunday, February 5, 2012 - 10:43

Astrophysicists looking through the Hubble Space Telescope have identified a black hole that appears to be helping new stars to form amongst its encircling gas clouds. Black holes had been thought to hinder the birth of stars, since their gravitational forces propel a strong flow of material that sweeps away the gas clouds from which stars are made. Now the scientists have found evidence that these same flows can also compress regions of gas and form them into new stars.

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Scientists Chart High-Precision Map of Milky Way's Magnetic Fields
Friday, February 3, 2012 - 12:27

Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory are part of an international team that has pooled their radio observations into a database, producing the highest precision map to date of the magnetic field within our own Milky Way galaxy.

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Stellar astrophysics helps to explain the behaviour of fast rotating neutron stars in binary systems
Friday, February 3, 2012 - 07:57

Pulsars are among the most exotic celestial bodies known. They have diameters of about 20 kilometres, but at the same time roughly the mass of our sun. A sugar-cube sized piece of its ultra-compact matter on the Earth would weigh hundreds of millions of tons. A sub-class of them, known as millisecond pulsars, spin up to several hundred times per second around their own axes.

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Surface of Mars an unlikely place for life after 600 million year drought
Friday, February 3, 2012 - 07:45

Mars may have been arid for more than 600 million years, making it too hostile for any life to survive on the planet’s surface, according to researchers who have been carrying out the painstaking task of analysing individual particles of Martian soil. Dr Tom Pike, from Imperial College London, will discuss the team’s analysis at a European Space Agency (ESA) meeting on 7 February 2012.

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