Latest Astrophysics Stories
University of Chicago The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has awarded $4.4 million to a collaboration of scientists at five United States universities and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center to help build a telescope for deployment on the International Space Station in 2017. The U.S. collaboration is part of a 13-nation effort to build the 2.5-meter ultraviolet telescope, called the Extreme Universe Space Observatory. UChicago Prof. Angela Olinto leads the U.S....
Royal Astronomical Society For only the second time in history, a team of scientists including Michele Fumagalli from the Carnegie Institution for Science in the United States have discovered an extremely rare triple quasar system. Their work is published in the Oxford University Press journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Quasars are extremely bright and powerful sources of energy that sit in the center of a galaxy, surrounding a black hole. In systems with...
NASA Science Using data from an aging NASA spacecraft, researchers have found signs of an energy source in the solar wind that has caught the attention of fusion researchers. NASA will be able to test the theory later this decade when it sends a new probe into the sun for a closer look. The discovery was made by a group of astronomers trying to solve a decades-old mystery: What heats and accelerates the solar wind? The solar wind is a hot and fast flow of magnetized gas that streams...
John P. Millis, PhD for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Astronomers have long been aware of supernovae – brilliant explosions ejecting massive amounts of gas and energy into the surrounding medium. But occasionally one of them is different, set apart, unlike anything we have seen before. Researchers with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) have announced in a new paper that one such event has been discovered. Supernovae are split into sub-types. While some...
[ Listen to the three-part interview with Prof. Holley-Bockelmann in RedOrbit’s Your Universe Today Podcasts ] John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online As astronomers peer out into the distant reaches of the Universe they find that some galaxies are emitting enormous amounts of radiation from their cores. Supermassive black holes at the center of these galaxies consume the surrounding gas and dust, heat it up, and thrust it into outer space at nearly the speed...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A 1970s classic video game character has photo-bombed a Hubble Space Telescope picture of the Abell 68 galaxy cluster. The alien from the computer game Space Invaders has shown up in an image of Abell 68, thanks to a little technique known as “gravitational lensing.” Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity helped scientists amplify the light that comes from very distant galaxies. Some images taken by the Hubble telescope...
Lights, cameras - even the mega-watt star - ran without plugging in, boosting the creative freedom of the production team LOS ANGELES, March 5, 2013 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- Hive Lighting just set a milestone in filmmaking: it produced the first commercial where everything-lights, cameras, and even the high-revving star-ran on batteries. Normally, sets for television commercials are cluttered with rented generators, electrical cables, and distribution boxes required to power the...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online While 2013 is supposed to be the year of Solar Max - the peak of the 11-year sunspot cycle - the relatively low solar activity recorded thus far has led experts to conclude that an unusual phenomenon has occurred. This most recent solar cycle has had not one but two peaks. According to NASA, sunspot numbers during the months of January and February 2013 were well below values recorded back in 2011. Furthermore, they report that...
[ Listen to the Webcast ] John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online As we search the heavens, one of the striking observations is that we are constantly bombarded by a stream of extremely high energy charged particles, traveling at nearly the speed of light. Known as Cosmic Rays – composed mostly (90%) of protons with the rest mostly heavy nuclei and a small number of electrons – these particles appear to come from all directions. But where do they come...
NASA [ Watch The Video ] NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope orbits our planet every 95 minutes, building up increasingly deeper views of the universe with every circuit. Its wide-eyed Large Area Telescope (LAT) sweeps across the entire sky every three hours, capturing the highest-energy form of light -- gamma rays -- from sources across the universe. These range from supermassive black holes billions of light-years away to intriguing objects in our own galaxy, such as X-ray...
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...
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