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Max Planck

Ancient Impacts Stained Vesta with Carbon-Rich Material

January 4, 2013

Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter Composite-color 3D image of Cornelia crater on Vesta (NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA) Ever since arriving at Vesta in July 2011, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has been capturing high-resolution images of the protoplanet’s surface, revealing a surprisingly varied and complex terrain covered in ridges, hills, grooves and, [...]

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How Plasma Technology From Space Will Save Our Lives

May 23, 2012

It might sound obvious to anyone who’s ever played a video game in the past thirty years, but plasma has been found to be very effective at destroying some truly dangerous beasts. Except in this case, the battlefields aren’t space bases, they’re hospitals… and the creatures aren’t CGI alien monsters, they’re very real — and [...]

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How Did Comet Lovejoy Survive Its Trip Around The Sun?

March 14, 2012

It was just about three months ago that the astronomy world watched in awe as the recently-discovered comet Lovejoy plummeted toward the Sun on what was expected to be its final voyage, only to reappear on the other side seemingly unscathed! Surviving its solar visit, Lovejoy headed back out into the solar system, displaying a [...]

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X-rays Reveal a Stellar-Mass Black Hole in Andromeda

February 23, 2012

An ultraluminous x-ray source (ULX) previously spotted in the neighboring Andromeda galaxy by NASA’s Chandra observatory has now been revealed to be a stellar-mass black hole, according to researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. The black hole was the first ULX seen in Andromeda, as well as the closest ever observed. Remove this [...]

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First Look at a Black Hole’s Feast

December 15, 2011

A true heart of darkness lies at the center of our galaxy: Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”) is a supermassive black hole with the mass of four million suns packed into an area only as wide as the distance between Earth and the Sun. Itself invisible to direct observation, Sgr A* makes its presence known through [...]

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