Space Science News

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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New super-Earth detected within the habitable zone of a nearby cool star
Thursday, February 2, 2012 - 14:07

An international team of scientists led by Carnegie’s Guillem Anglada-Escudé and Paul Butler has discovered a potentially habitable super-Earth orbiting a nearby star. The star is a member of a triple star system and has a different makeup than our Sun, being relatively lacking in metallic elements. This discovery demonstrates that habitable planets could form in a greater variety of environments than previously believed.

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A Pocket of Star Formation
Wednesday, February 1, 2012 - 09:03

This new view shows a stellar nursery called NGC 3324. It was taken using the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. The intense ultraviolet radiation from several of NGC 3324's hot young stars causes the gas cloud to glow with rich colours and has carved out a cavity in the surrounding gas and dust.

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