After a decade-long journey chasing its target, ESA’s Rosetta has today become the first spacecraft to rendezvous with a comet, opening a new chapter in Solar System exploration. Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko and Rosetta now lie 405 million kilometers from Earth, about half way between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars, rushing towards the inner Solar System at [continue reading]
Almost 14 billion years ago, the Universe we inhabit burst into existence in an extraordinary event that initiated the Big Bang. In the first fleeting fraction of a second, the Universe expanded exponentially, stretching far beyond the view of our best telescopes. All this, of course, was just theory. Image Credit: NASA Researchers from [continue reading]
Using the new capabilities of the upgraded Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), scientists have discovered previously-unseen binary companions to a pair of very young protostars. The discovery gives strong support for one of the competing explanations for how double-star systems form. Binary star formation through disk fragmentation starts (left) with a young [continue reading]
Planets form in disks of gas and dust around a star in the making, but when and how such protoplanetary disks form is still a mystery. Now, by using the ALMA radio telescope, a team of astronomers, led by the Leiden PhD student Nadia Murillo and professor Ewine Dishoeck, has found the youngest protoplanetary disk [continue reading]
The discovery of a giant planet orbiting its star at 650 times the average Earth-Sun distance has astronomers puzzled over how such a strange system came to be. This is an artist’s conception of a young planet in a distant orbit around its host star. The star still harbors a debris disk, remnant material [continue reading]
A team of astronomers led by Dr David Pinfield at the University of Hertfordshire have discovered two of the oldest brown dwarfs in our Milky Way galaxy. These ancient objects are moving at speeds of 100-200 kilometers per second, much faster than normal stars and other brown dwarfs and are thought to have formed [continue reading]