M-Class Solar Flare And Two Coronal Mass Ejections Detected Mid-Week
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online As the peak year of the solar maximum picks up in intensity, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) observed yet another solar flare and two coronal mass ejections (CMEs) mid-week. On...
Latest Astrophysics Stories
WASHINGTON, May 23, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Ring Nebula's distinctive shape makes it a popular illustration for astronomy books. But new observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope of the glowing gas shroud around an old, dying, sun-like star reveal a new twist. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) "The nebula is not like a bagel, but rather, it's like a jelly doughnut, because it's filled with material in the middle," said C. Robert O'Dell of...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online On Sunday (May 12) the Sun emitted a significant solar flare that is being classified as the first X-class event of 2013. The X1.7 flare, which peaked at about 10 p.m. EDT, was also associated with another solar event known as a coronal mass ejection (CME). While CMEs can release radiation and solar material in the direction they were produced, Sunday’s phenomenon was not directed at Earth. While solar flares also have the...
SKA Scientific studies done with the "PAPER" array, one of the world-class scientific instruments in South Africa's Karoo Radio Astronomy Reserve, is producing ground-breaking science and spectacular cosmic images, resulting in several important articles in top astronomy journals. The primary goal of PAPER (Precision Array to Probe the Epoch of Reionization) is to detect emission from the neutral gas that pervaded the universe before the first galaxies and black holes were formed. This...
[WATCH VIDEO: Space Warps Gravitational Lensing Animation] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Volunteers are being summoned to help astronomers find "space warps," leading to the discovery of faraway objects. Space warps, more commonly known as "gravitational lenses," allow objects in space to act as a giant lens to other objects even farther away. Studies have found that the human brain is much better at identifying lenses than current computer algorithms, so...
The worldwide leader in cold plasma-surgical technology intends to launch its first product for external applications in late 2013 YOKNEAM, Israel, May 8, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Results from a 16 patient study led by Prof. Abrahamyan at the Republican Institute of Reproductive Health, Perinatology, Obstetrics and Gynecology in Yerevan, Armenia demonstrate the safety and effectiveness of IonMed's BioWeld1TM cold plasma system. BioWeld1 is the first cold-plasma surgical system to...
NASA The sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 1:32 pm EDT on May 3, 2013. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. This disrupts the radio signals for as long as the flare is ongoing, and the radio blackout for this flare has already...
WATCH VIDEOS: [Panning Across NGC 6559] | [Zooming In On NGC 6559] John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The Danish 1.54-metre telescope located at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile has released a new image of the star-forming region NGC 6559. Located relatively nearby, a mere 5000 light-years from Earth, NGC 6559 is found in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer). The nebula is only a few light years across, a stark contrast to its more well-known...
[ Watch the Video: Fermi's Close Call with a Soviet Satellite ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online NASA said on Tuesday its Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope was able to dodge a 1.5-ton bullet in space. Julie McEnery, a project scientist for Fermi, opened her email at the end of March and found an automatically generated report arrived from NASA's Robotic Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis (CARA) team. The document said Fermi was just one week away from an...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Researchers at the Kavli IPMU, led by Robert Quimby, have discovered the first ever Type Ia supernova (SNIa), extraordinarily magnified by a gravitational lens. Scientists wrote in the Astrophysics Journal Letters they discovered the supernova, PS1-10afx, with the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System 1 (Pan-STARRS1). The supernova exploded over 9 billion years ago, making it a much further object than most studied...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Of all the active galactic nuclei, blazars are the brightest and emit very high-energy gamma rays. A team led by physicists from the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), has made new observations of the blazar known as PKS 1424+240 that reveal it is the most distant known source of very high-energy gamma rays. The emission spectrum of PKS 1424+240 now appears highly unusual in the light of new data. Data from the Hubble Space...
Latest Astrophysics Reference Libraries
The prominent feature that allows for the existence of life on Earth is the Sun. Radiation from our closest star provides heat and energy to our planet, driving biological processes and providing the necessary conditions for liquid water to naturally exist. But our Sun is only but one star in this vast Universe. And as it turns out, most stars are quite different than the one that illuminates our day. For this reason, scientists have, for hundreds of years, attempted to study the other...
Image Caption: NGC 4414, a typical spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices, is about 56,000 light-years in diameter and approximately 60 million light-years distant. Credit: NASA/ESA/Wikipedia What is Astrophysics? For much of the modern age the term Astrophysics has been used synonymously with Astronomy. This interchange is so common that many textbooks even offer the two as having the same meaning. However, from a strictly historical perspective there are differences...
Solar cycles: what are they and why should we care about them? Solar cycles are made up of what are known as solar minimums (min) and solar maximums (max). We refer to a solar min at the time when the sun is not active with many sunspots, while a solar max is just the opposite when we see a large increase in sunspot activity. So how long do solar cycles last? Typically they run on what is known as an 11 year cycle from the max to the min and then start over again anew. As of 2012 we...
Physics is a natural science involving the study of matter and its motion through space-time, along with related concepts such as energy and force. On a broader scale, it also involves the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves. Physics is one of the oldest academic disciplines, perhaps the oldest through its inclusion of astronomy. Physics was part of natural philosophy until the Scientific Revolution in the 16th century, when the natural...
The Astronomy and Astrophysics Review is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published quarterly by Springer Science Business Media. The editor-in-chief is Thierry Courvoisier. It was first published in April 1989. The journal covers all areas of astronomy and astrophysics, including cosmic ray physics, studies in the solar system, astrobiology, developments in laboratory or particle physics relevant to astronomy, instrumentation, computational or statistical methods with specific...
