Space

A new wide-field image released today by ESO has captured a large group  of galaxies belonging to the massive cluster known as Abell 315. As crowded as it may appear, this assembly of galaxies is only the proverbial "tip of the iceberg", as Abell 315 — like most galaxy clusters — is dominated by dark matter. The huge mass of this cluster deflects light from background galaxies, distorting their observed shapes slightly. When looking at the sky with the unaided eye, we mostly only see stars within our Milky Way galaxy and some of its closest neighbors. More distant galaxies are just too…

A satellite recently made the news for careening out of order and threatening other satellites with its unplanned path and bad driving. I just want to point out, that is not my satellite. Not my fault. I wasn't there.  I have an alibi! Short recap: The ground station lost control of the geostationary (always over the same part of the Earth) communications satellite Galaxy 15, which has now started to drift from its position while still broadcasting. Folks are worried because it's still transmitting, so it might cause signal interference with other statellite broadcasts. They need to…

There was a time when kids dreamt of being astronauts - a time when going up to the Moon was sexy and being a spaceman was the coolest job on the planet. As astronauts became global heroes they themselves were only too aware that there were many more heroes whose feet remained firmly on the ground but without whom those Moon missions would never have happened: Guenter Wendt was one of those heroes. Today, Monday 3 May, 2010, Guenter Wendt died from a stroke at the ripe old age of 85 at his home in Florida. Wendt became famous among astronauts as the Cape Canaveral launch pad leader - or 'pad…

Astronauts could one day tend their own crops on long space missions, and researchers from Purdue say a variety of strawberry called Seascape seems to meet the requirements for becoming a space crop. Seascape strawberries are day-neutral, meaning they aren't sensitive to the length of available daylight to flower. Seascape was tested with as much as 20 hours of daylight and as little as 10 hours. While there were fewer strawberries with less light, each berry was larger and the volume of the yields was statistically the same. The findings are detailed in Advances in Space Research. It almost…

An international team of researchers has captured an enormous cloud of cosmic gas and dust - BYF73 - in the process of collapsing in on itself, a discovery which could help explain how massive stars form. The team’s findings have been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Astronomers have a good grasp of how stars such as our Sun form from clouds of gas and dust, but how heavier stars form is still largely unknown. "Massive stars are rare, making up only a few per cent of all stars, and they will only form in significant numbers when really massive clouds of gas…

An international team of astrophysicists has just unveiled the most complete atlas of nuclear rings, enormous star-forming ring-shaped regions that circle certain galactic nuclei. The catalog, just published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, covers 113 nuclear rings in 107 different galaxies. Six are dust rings in elliptical galaxies; the rest are star-forming rings in disc galaxies. The nuclear rings are star-forming configurations located around galactic nuclei. They range in size on average from between 500 to 3,000 light years, and they are very bright because…

Astronomers have found signatures in X-ray data suggesting that two mid-sized black holes exist close to the center of the nearby starburst galaxy M82, located 12 million light years from Earth. These "survivor" black holes avoided falling into the center of the galaxy and could be examples of the seeds required for the growth of supermassive black holes in galaxies, including the one in the Milky Way. For several decades, scientists have had strong evidence for two distinct classes of black hole: the stellar-mass variety with masses about ten times that of the Sun, and the supermassive ones…

Astronomers have found evidence of water ice and organic material on the asteroid 24 Themis. The findings, detailed in Nature, support the idea that asteroids could be responsible for bringing water and organic material to Earth, researchers say. Using NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility on Hawaii's Mauna Kea, astronomers examined the surface of 24 Themis, a 200-kilometer wide asteroid that sits halfway between Mars and Jupiter. By measuring the spectrum of infrared sunlight reflected by the object, the researchers found the spectrum consistent with frozen water and determined that 24 Themis…

A long lost light reflector left on the lunar surface by the Soviet Union nearly 40 years ago has been found by a team of NASA physicists. The French-built laser reflector was sent aboard the unmanned Luna 17 mission, which landed on the moon November 17, 1970, releasing a robotic rover that roamed the lunar surface and carried the missing laser reflector. The Soviet lander and its rover, called Lunokhod 1, were last heard from on September 14, 1971. The discovery of the Soviet reflector came as a surprise, because scientists had actively searched for it for nearly four decades without…

A study in Applied and Environmental Microbiology suggests that bacteria common to spacecraft may be able to survive the harsh conditions on Mars long enough to inadvertently contaminate the planet with terrestrial life. Despite sterilization efforts made to reduce the bioload on spacecraft, recent research has shown that diverse microbial communities remain at the time of launch, including acinetobacter, bacillus, escherichia, staphylococcus and streptococcus. For the new study, researchers from the University of Central Florida replicated Mars-like conditions by inducing desiccation,…