Jul 29
Infalling gas in the heart of NGC 3115
Using the Chandra space
telescope, astronomers at
the University of Alabama
led by Ka-Wah Wong have
photographed and analysed,
in unprecedented detail in
the X-ray domain, the flux
of gas falling
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Jul 28
Leo's Triplet as seen by the VST
A spectacular demonstration of the power of the new VLT Survey Telescope (VST), and its camera, OmegaCAM, has arrived from the European Southern Observatory. The proof is this extremely wide
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Jul 27
Ring galaxies: Auriga's Wheel
Amongst the most spectacular
and rare galaxies known are
the so-called "ring
galaxies", the best known
examples being the Cartwheel
Galaxy, UGC 7069, and Hoag's
object (large image
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Jul 26
A new planetary nebula for Kepler
Using the 2.1 metre telescope of the Kitt Peak National Observatory, the Australian researcher Orsola De Marco and her Ph.D. student Dimitri Douchin (Macquarie University, Sidney) have confirmed
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Jul 22
A dive into the stars of M31
It is becoming common nowadays to discover something new and interesting while searching through archival data from the world's great telescopes. The 4 images above were taken by the Hubble Space
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Jul 21
New satellite of Pluto discovered
During an observing campaign aimed at searching for possible rings around Pluto, a team of researchers led by Mark Showalter (SETI Institute, Mountain View, California) using the Wide Field Camera
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Jul 18
Brown dwarfs near the Sun
There is no doubt that
Proxima Centauri, at a
distance of 4.2 light years
from the Sun, is the closest
star. However, it is less
certain which is the closest
brown dwarf (though they are
probably black or
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Jul 15
Ladies and Gentlemen... Vesta!
Finally we can see the real
face of Vesta, asteroid
number 4, discovered on 29th
March 1807 by Olbers. It was
photographed on 9th July by
the Dawn probe, after a
journey of almost four years
that
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Jul 14
Two very close white dwarfs
Around 20 binary systems,
made up of two white dwarfs
that orbit very close to
each other, have been
discovered so far, but the
latest, identified by a
research team led by Warren
Brown (Harvard
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Jul 13
Neptune, one orbit after its discovery
Yesterday, Neptune was in
approximately the same point
in its orbit as when it was
officially discovered on
23rd September 1846. In
other words, 1 Neptunian
year (165 terrestrial years)
have passed. To
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Jul 12
Chinese space station ready to go
Within a few months China will launch the first module of its own space station. This important new milestone reached by the Asian super-power, after the first manned orbital flight in 2003, the first lunar
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Jul 11
More anti-clockwise galaxies in the north?
The hypothesis that the Big
Bang was a symmetric event
with an initially uniform
expansion that caused the
whole Universe to be
isotropic on large scales,
has today been put into
question by a
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Jul 8
Revealed: the origin of primordial dust
Thanks to observations made
with the Herschel space
telescope of the supernova
1987A, it seems that an
explanation may have been
found as to why very
distant, and so very young,
galaxies are found
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Jul 7
Hydrogen peroxide in the
Rho Ophiuchi nebula
Useful as a disinfectant and
an old way of bleaching your
hair, hydrogen peroxide
(H2O2) has now been found
for the first time in
interstellar space, within
the nebula that surrounds
the star Rho
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Jul 6
1 million observations for Hubble!
On 4th July, national
holiday in the US, the
Hubble Space Telescope
reached an impressive
milestone: 1 million science
observations! The millionth
observation was of the
extrasolar planet HAT-P-7b,
a
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Jul 5
To find aliens look for sulphur
Even though, among the many
planetary systems known, we
have not managed to find a
planet that resembles the
Earth very closely, there
are already some fairly
clear ideas about what we
should look
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Jul 4
Martian rust covers traces of water
In recent years several small concentrations of carbonate minerals have been found on the surface of Mars. These minerals are of special interest because their formation is connected to the presence of
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Jul 1
The first galaxies: new evolutionary picture
The formation of new stars
in primordial galaxies, and
their subsequent growth, are
not directly linked to the
merger of smaller galaxies,
as previously thought, and
this process may not even be
the main
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