Latest Armagh Observatory Stories
An extraordinarily bright isolated star has been found in a nearby galaxy "” the star is three million times brighter than the Sun. All previous similar "superstars" were found in star clusters, but this brilliant beacon shines in solitary splendor. The origin of this star is mysterious: did it form in isolation or was it ejected from a cluster? Either option challenges astronomers' understanding of star formation.An international team of astronomers [1] has used ESO's Very Large Telescope...
Astronomers from the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland have found that a recently discovered asteroid has been following the Earth in its motion around the Sun for at least the past 250,000 years, and may be intimately related to the origin of our planet. Their work appears in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.The asteroid first caught the eye of the scientists, Apostolos "Tolis" Christou and David Asher, two months after it was found by the WISE...
A team of astronomers led by Dr Gavin Ramsay of Armagh Observatory have spotted violent eruptions from an interacting pair of stars that orbit around each other every 25 minutes. Unusually, these outbursts take place at regular and predictable intervals, erupting every two months. The new observations were made using the fully robotic Liverpool Telescope sited in the Canary Islands and the orbiting Swift observatory. The results will appear in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal...
