Space

Over the past week, ESA's Integral satellite has been observing an exceptional outburst of high-energy light produced by the black hole V404 Cygni that is devouring material from its stellar companion in our Milky Way galaxy, almost 8000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan. On June 15th 2015, V404 Cygni, a system comprising a black hole and a star orbiting one another, made its comeback. In this type of binary system, material flows from the star towards the black hole and gathers in a disc, where it is heated up, shining brightly at optical, ultraviolet and X-ray…

Astronomers expect that galaxies grow by swallowing smaller galaxies. But the evidence is usually not easy to see -- just as the remains of the water thrown from a glass into a pond will quickly merge with the pond water, the stars in the infalling galaxy merge in with the very similar stars of the bigger galaxy leaving no trace. But now a team of astronomers led by PhD student Alessia Longobardi at the Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik , Garching, Germany has applied a clever observational trick to clearly show that the nearby giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 merged with a…

We have already had a view from the Mediterranean of Jupiter, Venus and the Moon in Seeing Jupiter In Daylight.  Jupiter and Venus are getting closer together in the sky, and on the 1st of July, at around 8:00 UTC, actual conjunction will occur, when the two planets are at the same Ecliptic longitude (referring the annual path taken by the Sun against our stellar background.)  At that time, the planets will be below the Horizon for New World observers. However, I did go back to Stellarium and prepared this map for readers in the USA, since I guess that that’s where the majority of…

A new international project aiming to establish a human colony on Mars will be crowdfunded. The MarsPolar venture, that plans to create the first settlement on the Red Planet around 2029, is hopeful of being able to raise enough money to cover the costs of the pioneering journey. “I hope that we will have enough to contract the rover teams, to start preparing our first mission of sending two rovers to Mars,” Arteum Goncharov, The Co-Founder and CEO of MarsPolar told astrowatch.net. The crowdfunding will start on July 1 and will last 45 days, ending on Aug. 14. The team will…

An immense cloud of hydrogen has been observed dispersing from the warm, Neptune-sized planet Gliese 436b orbiting nearby star Gliese 436.  The enormous gaseous tail of the planet is about 50 times the size of the parent star.  A phenomenon this large has never before been seen around such a small exoplanet.  "Although the evaporation rate doesn't threaten the planet right now, we know that the star, a faint red dwarf, was more active in the past. This means that the planet's atmosphere evaporated faster during its first billion years of existence. Overall, we estimate…

Using ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft, scientists have identified more than a hundred patches of water ice a few meters in size on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Rosetta arrived at the comet in August 2014 at a distance of about 100 kilometers and eventually orbited the comet at 10 kilometers or less, allowing high-resolution images of the surface to be acquired.  Based on observations of the gas emerging from comets, they are known to be rich in ices. As they move closer to the Sun along their orbits, their surfaces are warmed and the ices sublimate into gas, which streams…

An international team of scientists has found some of the best evidence yet that Venus, Earth's nearest neighbor, is volcanically active. In combing through data from the European Space Agency's Venus Express mission, the scientists found transient spikes in temperature at several spots on the planet's surface. The hotspots, which were found to flash and fade over the course of just a few days, appear to be generated by active flows of lava on the surface. "We were able to show strong evidence that Venus is volcanically, and thus internally, active today," said James W. Head, a geologist at…

Have you ever seen Venus in full daylight ? It's a fun experience. Of course we are accustomed to see even a small crescent Moon in daylight -it is large and although of the same colour of clouds, it cannot be missed in a clear sky. But Venus is a small dot, and although it can be quite bright after the sunset or before dawn, during the day it is just a unconspicuous, tiny white dot which you never see, unless you look exactly in its direction.Venus shines at magnitudes ranging from -3.8 to -4.9, depending on its distance from Earth and the percentage of its disk illuminated by the Sun. To…

Now that Philae has woken up, we may be on the brink of major steps forward in our understanding of comets. We already know that perhaps as much as 30% of a comet consists of dust and organics. Now we'll be able to look at this close up. Why, though, do most scientists expect Philae to find pre-biotic chemistry? Is there any chance of life? Also, where else in the solar system can we look? So far, the only place we have searched is Mars, and our search there is in its early stages, focused on search for habitability. Recently we have started to plan spacecraft missions to oceans beneath…

Now that Philae has woken up, we may be on the brink of major steps forward in our understanding of comets. We already know that comets have high proportions of dust and organics - perhaps 30%. Now we'll be able to look at these close up. Why, though, do most scientists expect to find only pre-biotic chemistry in comets? Is there any chance of finding life there? Also, where else in the solar system can we look for life and prebiotic chemistry?  So far, the only place we have searched is Mars, and our search there is very much in the early stages. Recently we have started to plan…