Jan. 31 Deflecting NEOs with solar sails
Near Earth Objects
(asteroids that have orbits
bringing them dangerously
close to Earth) are
receiving ever more
attention, especially after
recent impacts on Jupiter.
There are two possible
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Jan. 28 Jupiter impact was an asteroid
On the 19th July 2009, between 9 and 11 UTC, a small celestial body crashed into Jupiter's atmosphere. The first to notice was an Australian amateur astronomer, Anthony Wesley, who immediately spread
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Jan. 27 VIRUS-W studies the heart of NGC 2903
The scientific results of
the so-called "first light"
observations of the Visible
Integral-field Replicable
Unit Spectrograph-W, have
just been made public.
VIRUS-W is a high resolution
spectrograph capable
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Jan. 26
The shock wave around Zeta Ophiuchi
If we look at Zeta Ophiuchi
with the naked eye, what we
see is an unremarkable,
reddish star of magnitude
2.5, without any trace of
nebulosity. The image
recently released by NASA
(above) shows
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Jan. 25
Light shed on the greatest mass extinction
A group of researchers at
the University of Calgary,
Canada, has discovered one
of the contributory factors
behind the great mass
extinction of the late
Permian period, that caused
the extinction
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Jan. 24
Active galaxies unveiled by X-rays
In the 10th February issue of The Astrophysical Journal, the results of the analysis of data taken by the Swift X-ray satellite will be published, showing that a significant fraction of active galaxies escape direct
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Jan. 21
The Tevatron may never see the Higgs boson
The second most powerful
particle accelerator in the
world, the Tevatron, pride
of the Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory
(Batavia, Illinois), won't
be able to continue
operations beyond September
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Jan. 20
Disturbed pulsations in WASP-33
In the constellation of
Andromeda, at a distance of
378 light years from Earth,
there is a Delta Scuti type
pulsating star, called
WASP-33, that has a giant
planet. Detected for the
first time in 2006, thanks
to
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Jan. 19
Exoplanets: inclined orbits dominant
Research by a team of
astronomers at the
University of Tokyo and the
National Astronomical
Observatory of Japan (NAOJ)
has found that orbits which
are strongly inclined with
respect to the spin axis of
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Jan. 18
Weighed: the super black hole in M87
6.6 billion solar masses. This is the mass of the
super-massive black hole
nested in the nucleus of the
enormous elliptical galaxy
M87, visible in the
constellation of Virgo and
about 50 million light
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Jan. 17
The great ocean of Gliese 581 g
A few months ago there was a great deal of talk about the exoplanet Gliese 581 g, in orbit around a red dwarf about 20 light years away. After being in the news for being the first that could have liquid
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Jan. 14
Cepheids are no longer standard!
The results of a very
interesting study on
Cepheids, that confirm that
the period-luminosity
relation of this class of
variable star can sometimes
be unreliable in the
calculation of cosmological
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Jan. 13
SDSS-III, the sky in a trillion pixels
At the 217th meeting of the
American Astronomical
Society, underway in
Seattle, the Sloan Digital
Sky Survey-III (SDSS-III)
team has made publicly
available the largest ever
digital image of the sky.
It's a
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Jan. 12
Star clusters in Hanny's Voorwerp
Just over two months ago, in
the 4th November
news, we
described the latest
findings concerning the
unusual celestial object
known as "Hanny's Voorwerp",
a gigantic gas cloud
illuminated by the light
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Jan. 11
Kepler-10b, the smallest exoplanet
The existence of Kepler-10b has been confirmed. This exoplanet is only 1.4 times larger than the Earth and orbits an 8 billion year old, solar type star, 560 light years away.
Catalogued as "Kepler-10", this
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Jan. 10
M31 from the far-infrared to X-rays
The research teams that
operate the Herschel and
XMM-Newton space telescopes
have celebrated Christmas by
producing a very unusual and
spectacular image of the
famous spiral galaxy in
Andromeda
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