Astronomers have long held that water—two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom—was a relative latecomer to the universe. They believed that any element heavier than helium had to have been formed in the cores of stars and ...
Astronomy
May 13, 2015
4
178
Star formation, once thought to consist essentially of just the simple coalescence of material by gravity, actually occurs in a complex series of stages. As the gas and dust in giant molecular clouds come together into stars, ...
Astronomy
May 8, 2015
31
1591
How soon after the Big Bang could water have existed? Not right away, because water molecules contain oxygen and oxygen had to be formed in the first stars. Then that oxygen had to disperse and unite with hydrogen in significant ...
Astronomy
Apr 28, 2015
9
482
In a paper published on 24 March in Nature Chemistry, researchers from Nijmegen and Bordeaux showed under which special conditions carbon monoxide molecules and helium atoms do not fly apart immediately following a collision, ...
Materials Science
Apr 1, 2015
0
8
More than a million young stars are forming in a hot, dusty cloud of molecular gases in a tiny galaxy near our own, an international team of astronomers has discovered.
Astronomy
Mar 18, 2015
2
2551
How did the Solar System's planets come to be? The leading theory is something known as the "protoplanet hypothesis", which essentially says that very small objects stuck to each other and grew bigger and bigger—big enough ...
Space Exploration
Jan 30, 2015
7
48
Given that our Solar System sits inside the Milky Way Galaxy, getting a clear picture of what it looks like as a whole can be quite tricky. In fact, it was not until 1852 that astronomer Stephen Alexander first postulated ...
Astronomy
Jan 14, 2015
1
167
(Phys.org) —In November, astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics presented new observations of the gas cloud G2 in the galactic centre originally discovered in 2011. These data are in remarkably ...
Astronomy
Nov 24, 2014
0
0
(Phys.org) —In a showdown of black hole versus G2 – a cloud of gas and dust – it looks like G2 won.
Astronomy
Nov 20, 2014
34
0
(Phys.org) —Astronomers working to estimate the rate of star formation inside murky distant galaxies, those shrouded in dust clouds that make it very difficult to study them, have published data from a brand new instrument, ...
Astronomy
Nov 7, 2014
0
0
