With a well-deserved reputation as monstrous destructive machines, black holes owe their power to huge quantities of mass that warp space and time until the gravitational force they command sucks in everything – even light. No surprise that astrophysicists have long considered gravity the dominant player in shaping the accretion disks of dust and [continue reading]
A meteorite found in Antarctica holds evidence of a once-active dynamo on Vesta. About 4.6 billion years ago, the Solar System was little more than a tenuous disk of gas and dust. In the span of merely 10 million years, this soup evolved to form today’s massive, complex planets. In the intervening period, however, [continue reading]
A group of astronomers led by Gregg Wade of the Royal Military College of Canada have used the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) at The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory and the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea to measure the most magnetic massive star yet. Their work is published in yesterday’s [continue reading]
The universe is comprised of a large amount of invisible matter, dark matter. It fills the space between the galaxies and between the stars in the galaxies. Since the prediction of the existence of dark matter more than 70 years ago, all sorts of researchers – astronomers, cosmologists and particle physicists have been looking [continue reading]
A University of Minnesota-led experiment is aboard NASA’s Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) mission, a probe of the forces that govern radiation in the Van Allen Radiation Belts. These two concentric, doughnut-shaped regions of space girdle the Earth and pose radiation danger to astronauts and spacecraft. The twin RBSP satellites and the Van Allen [continue reading]
Boston University undergraduate researcher Rob Marchwinski and his colleagues in BU’s Astronomy Department may have found the answer to a universal question: Why aren’t there more stars? The Night sky. Image credit: NASA and H. Richer/University of British Columbia A possible answer to that question presented itself to Marchwinski while he, graduate student Michael Pavel [continue reading]