Latest Astrophysics Stories
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online [ Watch the Video: Zooming in on the Pencil Nebula ] It seems a little early to already start decorating for Halloween, but the European Space Observatory has decided that it's never too early for a nebula shaped like a witch's broom. A new image of the Pencil Nebula shows a cloud of glowing gas making up part of a huge ring of wreckage left over after a supernova explosion that took place about 11,000 years ago. ESO has...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A bright new star outshone even Jupiter in 1604 and then it dimmed over several weeks. Johannes Kepler and other sky watchers witnessed this event, and centuries later, the debris left from this stellar explosion is known at the Kepler supernova remnant. Astronomers have studied the Kepler supernova remnant for a long time trying to determine exactly what happened when the star exploded. New analysis of a long observation by NASA's...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers have measured the largest-ever magnetic field around a massive star and reported their findings in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The team used the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) at The University of Texas McDonald Observatory and the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) on Hawaii's Mauna Kea to determine that the star's magnetic field is 20,000 times stronger than the Sun's. The magnetic...
Watch the Video: Filament Eruption August 31, 2012 Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists from NASA have discovered an enormous ‘solar whip’ on the surface of the Sun and have warned that radiation from the phenomenon is heading straight toward Earth, arriving on our doorstep sometime today. The stunning event was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and, according to a report from Mail Online’s Mark Prigg, video and images of the...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A recent study, led by Edo Berger of Harvard University, made the most of a dying star's fury to probe a distant galaxy some 9.5 billion light years away. The most distant stellar explosion of its kind ever studied, that dying star lit up the galactic scene. “It’s like someone turned on a flashlight in a dark room and suddenly allowed us to see, for a short time, what this far-off galaxy looks like, what it is composed of," said...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists have long believed that spacetime is foamy, like a freshly pulled draft beer, but new information from an intergalactic photo finish shows it might just be as smooth as a single malt whiskey, instead. Robert Nemiroff, a physicist at Michigan Technological University, reached this conclusion after studying the tracings of three photons of differing wavelengths that had been recorded by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope...
Video: Binary Star System that Produces Recurrent Novae Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online For the first time, astronomers have observed a Type 1a supernova progenitor system, according to a report in the journal Science. Previous evidence pointed to the merger of two white dwarf stars as the originators of other Type 1a supernovae. However, this new study led by Ben Dilday, a postdoctoral researcher in physics at UC Santa Barbara and at Las Cumbres Observatory...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A debate that has been raging over the distribution of matter in the universe can finally be put to bed thanks to the WiggleZ Dark Matter survey that was conducted over 276 nights from August 2006 to January 2011. The majority of physicists believe that the matter in the universe is distributed evenly on the largest scales and this outlook has fueled everything from Einstein’s equations to calculations that are the foundation for the...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Magnetic turbulence is most likely the reason that solar wind moving away from our sun and our solar system is hotter than it theoretically should be, according to new research from scientists at the University of Warwick. As solar wind leaves the sun and expands beyond the solar system, it should begin to cool off due to the lack of particle collisions to dissipate energy, the university explained in a Friday press release. That...
Associated Universities Inc. (AUI) and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) have made a preliminary examination of the report released today from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Astronomy Portfolio Review Committee (PRC). Among the recommendations of that report are that the NSF’s Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) be fully divested from the NSF Astronomy Division’s portfolio of research facilities in the next five years, with no further...
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...
![NASA\](/media/gallery/fermi-gamma-ray-space-telescope/thumbs/thumbs_746305main_swift_xrt.jpg "NASA\")
