http://phys.org/space-news/astronomy/ en-us PhysOrg Team Phys.Org provides the latest news on astronomy, space, earth science and space exploration. (Phys.org) -- Giant bubbles, towering pillars and cascading clouds of dust and gas fill the star-forming nursery of the Carina Nebula seen here in a stunning new view from Herschel to launch ESA Space Science’s image of the week feature. The Carina Nebula is some 7500 lightyears from Earth and hosts some of the most massive and luminous stars in our Galaxy, including double-star system eta Carinae, which boasts over 100 times the mass of our Sun.The total amount of gas and dust traced by ESA’s Herschel space observatory in this image is equivalent to some 650 000 Suns. Including warmer gas not well traced by Herschel, the total mass may be as high as 900 000 Suns. http://phys.org/news258055733.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-06-04T19:09:08-07:00 (Phys.org) -- Astronomers have found strong evidence that a massive black hole is being ejected from its host galaxy at a speed of several million miles per hour. New observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory suggest that the black hole collided and merged with another black hole and received a powerful recoil kick from gravitational wave radiation. http://phys.org/news258035163.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-06-04T13:26:18-07:00 A team of astronomers led by Takatoshi Shibuya, Dr. Nobunari Kashikawa, Dr. Kazuaki Ota, and Dr. Masanori Iye (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan) has used the Subaru and Keck Telescopes to discover the most distant galaxy ever found, SXDF-NB1006-2, at a distance of 12.91 billion light years from the Earth. This galaxy is slightly farther away than GN-108036, which Subaru Telescope discovered last year and was the most distant galaxy discovered at the time. In addition, the team's research verified that the proportion of neutral hydrogen gas in the 750-million-year-old early Universe was higher than it is today. These findings help us to understand the nature of the early Universe during the "cosmic dawn", when the light of ancient celestial objects and structures appeared from obscurity. http://phys.org/news258016857.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-06-04T08:21:29-07:00 (Phys.org) -- A team of Penn State University astronomers has obtained very precise measurements of a pair of stars that are orbited by a planet -- like the stellar system of the fictional planet Tatooine in the movie Star Wars. The orbits of the stars and planet in the system, named Kepler-16, are aligned so that they eclipse or transit each other when observed from Earth. These new measurements will aid astronomers in understanding how stars and planetary systems form. http://phys.org/news258007590.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-06-04T05:47:18-07:00 Astronomers at Arizona State University have found an exceptionally distant galaxy, ranked among the top 10 most distant objects currently known in space. Light from the recently detected galaxy left the object about 800 million years after the beginning of the universe, when the universe was in its infancy. http://phys.org/news257767571.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-06-01T11:06:40-07:00 (Phys.org) -- Because astronomy and astrophysics are still so much a mixture of theory, conjecture and generally difficult to measure phenomenon, at least as compared with many of the other sciences, one of the most highly respected science journals, Science, has chosen to run a series of articles detailing eight of what it deems the most compelling questions currently vexing those who study the cosmos; each written by someone uniquely qualified to delve into the subject matter at hand. http://phys.org/news257758286.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-06-01T08:31:46-07:00 A University of Delaware-led research team reports an advance in the June 1 issue of Science that may help astrophysicists more accurately analyze the vast molecular clouds of gas and dust where stars are born. http://phys.org/news257703410.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-31T18:10:01-07:00 (Phys.org) -- Astronomers from The University of Texas at Austin and Wesleyan University have used the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at UT Austin’s McDonald Observatory to confirm that a Jupiter-size planet in a nearby solar system is dissolving, albeit excruciatingly slowly, because of interactions with its parent star. Their findings could help astronomers better understand star-planet interactions in other star systems that might involve life. http://phys.org/news257705158.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-31T17:46:07-07:00 (Phys.org) -- NASA astronomers announced Thursday they can now predict with certainty the next major cosmic event to affect our galaxy, sun, and solar system: the titanic collision of our Milky Way galaxy with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy. http://phys.org/news257697716.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-31T15:42:18-07:00 (Phys.org) -- An international team of astronomers using data from the European Space Agency's (ESA) XMM-Newton satellite has identified a long-sought X-ray "echo" that promises a new way to probe supersized black holes in distant galaxies. http://phys.org/news257697519.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-31T15:38:52-07:00 (Phys.org) -- A new image of the galaxy Centaurus A, made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), shows how the observatory allows astronomers to see through the opaque dust lanes that obscure the galaxy's center, with unprecedented quality. ALMA is currently in its Early Science phase of observations and still under construction, but is already the most powerful of its kind. The observatory has just issued the call for proposals for its next cycle of observations. http://phys.org/news257682435.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-31T11:27:33-07:00 Astronomers around the world will be using advanced telescopes to watch Venus cross in front of the Sun on June 5 and 6 in the hopes of finding clues in the hunt for other planets where life may exist. http://phys.org/news257671332.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-31T09:20:02-07:00 (Phys.org) -- In the never ending quest to find out if there is life out there beyond our own planet, astronomers, astrophysicists and other researchers use all manner of tools to scan the sky looking for likely places; the most likely of course, being on a planet that is similar to our own. The problem thus far though, is that instruments used to look for so called exoplanets are relatively good at finding large planets that are close to their star, but not so much at finding those that are smaller, more rocky and more distant. That problem appears to be solved now though as a combined team of researchers from Germany and Spain have applied a new kind of calibration to spectrographs used to measure the wobble of stars due to planetary tugging. The team describes their work in their paper published in the journal Nature. http://phys.org/news257671009.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-31T08:17:36-07:00 (Phys.org) -- Unfortunately, stars don't have birth certificates. So, astronomers have a tough time figuring out their ages. Knowing a star's age is critical for understanding how our Milky Way galaxy built itself up over billions of years from smaller galaxies. http://phys.org/news257612950.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-30T16:09:22-07:00 Measuring distance doesn’t sound like a very challenging thing to do — just pick your standard unit of choice and corresponding tool calibrated to it, and see how the numbers add up. Use a meter stick, a tape measure, or perhaps take a drive, and you can get a fairly accurate answer. But in astronomy, where the distances are vast and there’s no way to take measurements in person, how do scientists know how far this is from that and what’s going where? http://phys.org/news257586504.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-30T08:48:35-07:00 (Phys.org) -- More atomic hydrogen gas — the ultimate fuel for stars — is lurking in today's Universe than we thought, CSIRO astronomer Dr. Robert Braun has found. http://phys.org/news257584493.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-30T08:17:56-07:00 (Phys.org) -- As galaxies go, our Milky Way is pretty quiet. Active galaxies have cores that glow brightly, powered by supermassive black holes swallowing material, and often spit twin jets in opposite directions. In contrast, the Milky Way's center shows little activity. But it wasn't always so peaceful. New evidence of ghostly gamma-ray beams suggests that the Milky Way's central black hole was much more active in the past. http://phys.org/news257513533.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-29T12:33:01-07:00 (Phys.org) -- Astronomers used to think that star formation simply involved the gradual coalescence of material under the influence of gravity. No longer. Making a new star is a complex process, among other things assembling a circumstellar disk (possibly preplanetary in nature) and at the same time ejecting material as bipolar jets perpendicular to those disks. These outflows help the young star balance its growth as new material accretes, but at the same time they disrupt the environment. Although jets from young stars have been known for over twenty years, their influences on the environment have remained uncertain, in part because the dusty natal clouds in which stars form obscure optical light. http://phys.org/news257412917.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-28T09:10:02-07:00 (Phys.org) -- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the spiral galaxy known as ESO 498-G5. One interesting feature of this galaxy is that its spiral arms wind all the way into the center, so that ESO 498-G5's core looks like a bit like a miniature spiral galaxy. This sort of structure is in contrast to the elliptical star-filled centers (or bulges) of many other spiral galaxies, which instead appear as glowing masses. http://phys.org/news257407302.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-28T07:02:20-07:00 Astronomers are gearing for one the rarest events in the Solar System: an alignment of Earth, Venus and the Sun that will not be seen for another 105 years. http://phys.org/news257238908.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-26T08:15:31-07:00 Australia has hailed a surprise decision giving it a role in a radio telescope project aimed at revolutionising astronomy, vowing to draw on its decades of experience in space science. http://phys.org/news257238748.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-26T08:12:38-07:00 A long-running joust to host a radio telescope that would give mankind its farthest peek into the Universe ended on Friday with a Solomon-like judgement to split the site between Australia and South Africa. http://phys.org/news257155017.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-25T08:57:08-07:00 (Phys.org) -- This image of the Pinwheel Galaxy, or also known as M101, combines data in the infrared, visible, ultraviolet and X-rays from four of NASA's space-based telescopes. This multi-spectral view shows that both young and old stars are evenly distributed along M101's tightly-wound spiral arms. Such composite images allow astronomers to see how features in one part of the spectrum match up with those seen in other parts. It is like seeing with a regular camera, an ultraviolet camera, night-vision goggles and X-ray vision, all at the same time. http://phys.org/news257152783.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-25T08:20:04-07:00 A research team from the University of Tokyo/Kavli IPMU, Ehime University, and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) has succeeded in conducting the first, full-scale scientific observationswith an adaptive optics (AO) system at optical wavelengths. The team connected the Kyoto Tridimensional Spectrograph II with the Subaru Telescope's Adaptive Optics system and improved the spatial resolution of images by a factor of 2.5 over images taken without AO. Observations using Kyoto3DII coupled with AO 188 are likely to reveal the detailed structures and the formation processes of galaxies. http://phys.org/news257151397.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-25T07:57:26-07:00 An international team of astronomers has used the International LOFAR Telescope from ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, to study the formation of the galaxy cluster Abell 2256. http://phys.org/news257067518.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-24T08:38:50-07:00 A recent study proposes the galaxy is crowded with nomad planets adrift in space. If this is the case, nomad planets may play a dynamic role in the universe. http://phys.org/news256998852.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-23T13:34:29-07:00 While Kepler and similar missions are turning up planets by the fist full, there’s long been many places that astronomers haven’t expected to find planetary systems. The main places include regions where gravitational forces conspire to make the region around potential host stars too unstable to form into planets. And there’s no place in the galaxy with a larger gravitational force than the galactic center where a black hole four and a half million times more massive than the Sun, lurks. But a new study shows evidence that a disk, potentially far enough along to begin forming planets, is in the process of being disrupted. http://phys.org/news256988902.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-23T11:00:04-07:00 A few hours before sunset on June 5th, 2012 residents of the Washington, DC metropolitan area will have a chance to witness one of the rarest celestial phenomena known: a “Transit of Venus”. http://phys.org/news256988561.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-23T10:43:52-07:00 (Phys.org) -- The universe is a marvelously complex place, filled with galaxies and larger-scale structures that have evolved over its 13.7-billion-year history. Those began as small perturbations of matter that grew over time, like ripples in a pond, as the universe expanded. By observing the large-scale cosmic wrinkles now, we can learn about the initial conditions of the universe. But is now really the best time to look, or would we get better information billions of years into the future - or the past? http://phys.org/news256927340.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-22T17:42:26-07:00 Recent reports of dark matter’s demise may be greatly exaggerated, according to a new paper from researchers at the Institute for Advanced Study. http://phys.org/news256900661.html Space & Earth - Astronomy 2012-05-22T10:30:08-07:00