Category: Astronomy

Einstein was right. Well, according to new observations of a double pulsar, he was at least 99.95% right. An international team of astronomers have been measuring the pulsar pair for three years, and have detected several effects that match Einstein’s theory of general relativity. It’s believed the two pulsars are losing energy through the radiation of gravitational waves, and will eventually spiral into each other.
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The powerful Subaru telescope in Hawai’i has found the most distant galaxy ever seen, located 12.88 billion light-years away – this is only 780 million years after the Big Bang. Observing objects this distant is extremely difficult, not only because of the great distances involved, but because much of the Universe was obscured behind neutral hydrogen. Stars only then began clearing out this neutral hydrogen, making the Universe transparent.
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Provisionally designated 2003ub313, and nicknamed Xena by its discoverers, this newly discovered dwarf planet has been officially named Eris by the International Astronomical Union. The name was proposed by Mike Brown, a member of the team that made its discovery, and the name was accepted by the committee. In Greek lore, Eris is the goddess of discord and strife. Its moon has been named Dysnomia, the Daimon spirit of lawlessness.
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Although our Milky Way formed from a single, giant cloud of gas and dust, new research has found that the stars in the disc are different from those in the bulge. A new survey has measured the amount of oxygen in 50 stars in the Milky Way using the ESO’s Very Large Telescope to determine when and how the stars formed. The survey found that stars in the bulge probably formed in less than a billion years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was still young; the stars in the disc came later.
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NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope recently captured this image of the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of a handful of dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way. This single image, containing about a third of the entire galaxy, is actually made up of 300,000 individual frames captured by Spitzer, and then stitched together on computer to create a gigantic mosaic. Because Spitzer’s infrared view allows it to pierce through obscuring dust and gas, this new research has revealed nearly a million never-before-seen objects – mostly stars.
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Astronomers have discovered a rapidly spinning pulsar with a powerful magnetic field – called a magnetar – that’s demonstrating some brand new tricks. Located about 10,000 light years from Earth, this magnetar is sending out powerful pulses of radio waves at regular intervals; normally magnetars are only seen in the X-ray spectrum. The discoverers think that the magnetic field around the star is twisting, causing huge electric currents to flow – these currents are generating the radio pulses.
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The Japanese AKARI spacecraft – formerly known as Astro-F – captured this photograph of the reflection nebula IC 1396. This nebula is a bright star-forming region located about 3,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Cepheus, and it contains several young stars dozens of times more massive than our Sun. AKARI was able to reveal many new stars that were previously invisible because of its ability to see in the far infrared spectrum.
Continue reading “Birth of Stars Seen by AKARI”