Two white dwarfs circle around one other, locked in a fatal tango. With an intimate orbit and a hefty combined mass, the pair is ultimately destined to collide, merge, and erupt in a titanic explosion: a Type Ia supernova. Or so goes the theory behind the infamous “standard candles” of cosmology. Now, in a paper published in today’s issue of […]
Huge disks of dust and gas encircle many young stars. Some contain circular gaps — likely the result of forming planets carving out cavities along their orbital paths — that make the disks look more like ripples in a pond than flat pancakes. But astronomers know only a few examples, including the archetypal disk surrounding Beta […]
This picture shows it is possible to look at Rosetta’s comet from Earth, but what a lot of work it requires! The picture you see above is a composite of 40 separate images taken by the Very Large Telescope (removing the background stars). Despite the fact that Rosetta is right next to Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, ground-based […]
What’s it like to spend a night at a huge telescope observatory? Jordi Busque recorded a brilliant timelapse of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). What makes this video unique is not only the exotic location in Chile, but the use of sound in the area rather than music.
The Universe is overflowing with cosmic dust. Planets form in swirling clouds of dust around a young star; Dust lanes hide more-distant stars in the Milky Way above us; And molecular hydrogen forms on the dust grains in interstellar space. Even the soot from a candle is very similar to cosmic carbon dust. Both consist […]
Dust clouds on a brown dwarf or “failed star” are making it appear redder than its counterparts, new research reveals. Better studying this phenomenon could improve the weather forecast on these objects, which are larger than gas giant planets but not quite big enough to ignite nuclear fusion processes to become stars. “These are not […]
Some 160,000 light years away towards the constellation of Dorado (the Swordfish), is an amazing area of starbirth and death. Located in our celestial neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud, this huge stellar forge sculpts vast clouds of gas and dust into hot, new stars and carves out ribbons and curls of nebulae. However, in this […]
As the chill of winter settles into the northern hemisphere, fantasies of down-south travel pervade a lot of people’s dreams. Well, here’s a virtual journey to warm climes for astronomy buffs: a beautiful, music-filled timelapse of several European Southern Observatory telescopes gazing at the heavens in Chile. Uploaded in 2011 (but promoted this morning on […]