Was it a catastrophic collision in the star's asteroid belt? A giant impact that disrupted a nearby planet? A dusty cloud of rock and debris? A family of comets breaking apart? Or was it alien megastructures built to harvest ...
Astronomy
Nov 25, 2015
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(Phys.org) —At some stage after its birth in the big bang, the universe began to make galaxies. No one knows exactly when, or how, this occurred. For that matter, astronomers do not know how the lineages of our own Milky ...
Astronomy
Apr 12, 2013
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(PhysOrg.com) -- In 1908, Harvard astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt discovered that a class of stars called Cepheids have brightnesses that vary regularly with periods that are directly related to their intrinsic luminosities.
Astronomy
Jan 29, 2010
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(PhysOrg.com) -- A new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope offers a rare view of an imminent collision between the cores of two merging galaxies, each powered by a black hole with millions of times the mass of the sun. ...
Astronomy
Mar 16, 2009
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The infrared observatory Spitzer has been at work for 10 years, revealing the cool dusty regions where stars and planets form, as well as shedding light on planets, exoplanets, stars and galaxies. Spitzer data have brought ...
Astronomy
Oct 1, 2013
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It is likely that at your next visit to the doctor, a medical practitioner will start by taking your temperature. This has been part of medical practice for so long that we may see it as antiquated, with little value. However, ...
Engineering
Dec 6, 2013
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This swirling landscape of stars is known as the North America Nebula. In visible light, the region resembles North America, but in this image infrared view from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, the continent disappears.
Space Exploration
Oct 19, 2011
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GW170817 is the name given to a gravitational wave signal seen by the LIGO and Virgo detectors on 17 August 2017. Lasting for about 100 seconds, the signal was produced by the merger of two neutron stars. The observation ...
Astronomy
Aug 6, 2018
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Over the past decade, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and other modern, giant telescopes have opened a new era in observational cosmology. By staring for long times at so-called "dark fields"—regions of the sky without ...
Astronomy
Aug 21, 2013
4
0
(PhysOrg.com) -- Looking like a spider's web swirled into a spiral, Galaxy IC 342 presents its delicate pattern of dust in this image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Seen in infrared light, faint starlight gives way ...
Astronomy
Mar 20, 2012
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