The inner, yellow portion of HD 61005’s disc spans 8,7 billion km, or about the width of Neptune’s orbit in our own solar system. This false-colour Hubble view masks the star’s direct light to bring out detail in the disc. Image credit: Nasa/ESA/D Hines (Space Science Inst., New Mexico) and G Schneider (Univ. of Arizona) …
Warped debris discs around stars are blowing in the wind Read More »
The latest vista from ESO’s GigaGalaxy Zoom project homes in on the central parts of our Milky Way Galaxy. Click for link to high resolution image. Image: ESO/S Guisard. DR EMILY BALDWIN ASTRONOMY NOW Posted: September 21, 2009 The European Southern Observatory has today released the second of three new breath-taking portraits showing the Milky …
The Abell 370 galaxy cluster, seen here by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, is 5 billion light years from Earth. The cluster’s gravity bends the light of galaxies that are even more distant, distorting and magnifying them in a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. (Image: NASA/ESA/Hubble SM4 ERO Team/ST-ECF) The most dramatic example of gravitational lensing …
Upgraded Hubble telescope spies cosmic ‘dragon’ – New Scientist magazine Read More »
Cassini has found Titan’s upper atmosphere to consist of a surprising number of layers of haze, as shown in this ultraviolet image of Titan’s night-side limb, colourised to look like true colour. The many fine haze layers extend several hundred kilometres above the surface. Although this is a night side view, with only a thin …
Unravelling the chemistry of Titan’s hazy atmosphere Read More »
A trip to Phobos comes with extras (Image: NASA/JPL) 16 September 2009 by David Shiga FORGET the risk of exploding rockets or getting sideswiped by a wayward bit of space junk. Radiation may be the biggest hurdle to human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit and could put a damper on a recently proposed mission to Mars …
Too much radiation for astronauts to make it to Mars Read More »
