NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is on track to become the first probe to orbit and study two distant Solar System destinations, to help scientists answer questions about the formation of our Solar System. The spacecraft is scheduled to leave the giant asteroid Vesta on Sept. 4 PDT (Sept. 5 EDT) to start its two-and-a-half-year journey [continue reading]
Small patches of ice could make up at most five to ten percent of material in walls of Shackleton crater. Shackleton is an impact crater at the south pole of the Moon. The crater is more than 12 miles wide and two miles deep (21 km in diameter and 4.2 km deep). Image Credit: [continue reading]
Nature hath no fury like a dying star – and astronomers couldn’t be happier… An international research team, led by Edo Berger of Harvard University, made the most of a dying star’s fury to probe a distant galaxy some 9.5 billion light-years distant. The dying star, which lit the galactic scene, is the [continue reading]
NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission has led to a bonanza of newfound supermassive black holes and extreme galaxies called hot DOGs, or dust-obscured galaxies. The entire sky as mapped by WISE at infrared wavelengths is shown here, with an artist’s concept of the WISE satellite superimposed. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA Images from the telescope [continue reading]
A team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has spotted sugar molecules in the gas surrounding a young Sun-like star. This is the first time sugar been found in space around such a star, and the discovery shows that the building blocks of life are in the right place, at the [continue reading]
A team of astronomers has found the first transiting circumbinary multi-planet system: two planets orbiting around a pair of stars. This discovery shows that planetary systems can form and survive even in the chaotic environment around a binary star. And that such planets can exist in the habitable zone of their stars. The results [continue reading]