Image: The magnetic field along the galactic plane

While the pastel tones and fine texture of this image may bring to mind brush strokes on an artist's canvas, they are in fact a visualisation of data from ESA's Planck satellite. The image portrays the interaction between ...

NASA simulator successfully recreates space dust

(Phys.org) —A team of scientists at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., has successfully reproduced, right here on Earth, the processes that occur in the atmosphere of a red giant star and lead to the ...

Supernova's super dust factory imaged with ALMA

Galaxies can be remarkably dusty places and supernovas are thought to be a primary source of that dust, especially in the early Universe. Direct evidence of a supernova's dust-making capabilities, however, has been slim and ...

Soccer balls in interstellar space

An international team of astronomers led by Masaaki Otsuka (Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics or ASIAA) has detected the C60 fullerene (molecules of carbon with 60 atoms arranged in patterns resembling ...

Shocking news about dust grains

(Phys.org)—The ubiquitous clouds of gas and dust found between stars provide the natal material for new stars and planets. These clouds are also dynamic factories that produce many complex molecules thanks to their rich ...

Interstellar dust and the sun

(Phys.org)—The space between stars is not empty. It contains copious but diffuse amounts of gas and dust; in fact about 5-10% of the total mass of our Milky Way galaxy is in interstellar gas. About 1% of the mass of this ...

Measuring magnetic fields

(Phys.org) -- Polarized light is a familiar phenomenon, as people who prefer polarized sunglasses can testify. The electric field in a beam of light can vibrate either left-right or up-down, and the scattering or reflection ...

Water vapor in space

(PhysOrg.com) -- Water is a critical molecule for human life, and, because it is abundant in the interstellar medium, it also plays an important role in the life of molecular clouds and the stars and planets that form in ...

Building a new planet

(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers over the past decade have made remarkable progress in the study of extrasolar planets; over 500 distant worlds are now confirmed. Meanwhile, as this active research community continues to discover ...

Mapping the Milky Way's magnetic field in 3D

We are all very familiar with the concept of the Earth's magnetic field. It turns out that most objects in space have magnetic fields but it's quite tricky to measure them. Astronomers have developed an ingenious way to measure ...

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