Las Cumbres Observatory 'Sinistro' astronomy imager captures first light

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The Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope has captured its first on-sky images with the production Sinistro CCD camera.

via Science Daily

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Monster galaxies lose their appetite with age

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(Phys.org) —Our universe is filled with gobs of galaxies, bound together by gravity into larger families called clusters. Lying at the heart of most clusters is a monster galaxy thought to grow in size by merging with neighboring galaxies, a process astronomers call galactic cannibalism.



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NASA Awards Contract for Gaseous Nitrogen Supply

via NASA Breaking News

http://www.nasa.gov/press/2013/august/nasa-awards-contract-for-gaseous-nitrogen-supply

NASA's Space Launch System Completes Preliminary Design Review

via NASA Breaking News

http://www.nasa.gov/press/2013/august/nasas-space-launch-system-completes-preliminary-design-review

NASA technologist makes traveling to hard-to-reach destinations easier

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Traveling to remote locations sometimes involves navigating through stop-and-go traffic, traversing long stretches of highway and maneuvering sharp turns and steep hills. The same can be said for guiding spacecraft to far-flung destinations in space. It isn't always a straight shot.

via Science Daily

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New Explorer mission chooses the 'just-right' orbit

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Principal investigator George Ricker likes to call it the "Goldilocks orbit" -- it's not too close to Earth and her Moon, and it's not too far. In fact, it's just right. And as a result of this never-before-used orbit — advanced and fine-tuned by NASA engineers and other members of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) team — the Explorer mission led by Ricker will be perfectly positioned to map the locations of more than 500 transiting exoplanets, extrasolar planets that periodically eclipse each one’s host star.

via Science Daily

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When galaxies switch off: Hubble's COSMOS survey solves 'quenched' galaxy mystery

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Some galaxies hit a point in their lives when their star formation is snuffed out, and they become "quenched". Quenched galaxies in the distant past appear to be much smaller than the quenched galaxies in the Universe today. This has always puzzled astronomers -- how can these galaxies grow if they are no longer forming stars? A team of astronomers has now used a huge set of Hubble observations to give a surprisingly simple answer to this long-standing cosmic riddle.

via Science Daily

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When galaxies switch off: Hubble's COSMOS survey solves 'quenched' galaxy mystery

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Some galaxies hit a point in their lives when their star formation is snuffed out, and they become "quenched". Quenched galaxies in the distant past appear to be much smaller than the quenched galaxies in the Universe today. This has always puzzled astronomers—how can these galaxies grow if they are no longer forming stars? A team of astronomers has now used a huge set of Hubble observations to give a surprisingly simple answer to this long-standing cosmic riddle.



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New class of old star cluster discovered

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(Phys.org) —Star clusters with properties not seen before have been discovered by an international team of astrophysicists, led by Swinburne University of Technology's Professor Duncan Forbes.



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New data help astronomers explore the hidden Milky Way

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(Phys.org) —Today, astronomers with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III, or SDSS-III – including University of Virginia astronomers – released a new online public data set featuring 60,000 stars that are helping to tell the story of how our Milky Way galaxy formed, the subject of scientific speculation and debate for hundreds of years.



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Under leaden skies: Where heavy metal clouds the stars

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(Phys.org) —In a paper shortly to be published in the Oxford University Press journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of astronomers from the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland report the discovery of two unusual stars with extremely high concentrations of lead in their atmospheres.



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Researchers develop nanodiamond thermometer to take temperature of individual cells

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(Phys.org) —Researchers working at a lab at Harvard University have developed a technique that allows for taking the temperature of individual living cells. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the team describes their technique and just how precise temperature measurements taken with it can be.



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Water in a martian desert

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Craters once brim-full with sediments and water have long since drained dry, but traces of their former lives as muddy lakes cling on in the martian desert.

via ESA Space Science

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Mars_Express/Water_in_a_martian_desert

Carina Nebula - Happy Birthday Greeting Cards

Carina Nebula - Happy Birthday Greeting Cards

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series

A fantastic greetings card showing a panoramic view of the WR 22 and Eta Carinae regions of the Carina Nebula.

This spectacular panoramic view combines a new image of the field around the Wolf–Rayet star WR 22 in the Carina Nebula (right) with an earlier picture of the region around the unique star Eta Carinae in the heart of the nebula (left).

The picture was created from images taken with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

It's a stunning, mind-blowing, fantastic image that reveals a little of the wonder that is our universe.

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Image code: crnneb

ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA www.eso.org
Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

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Spitzer discovers young stars with a 'hula hoop'

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(Phys.org) —Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have spotted a young stellar system that "blinks" every 93 days. Called YLW 16A, the system likely consists of three developing stars, two of which are surrounded by a disk of material left over from the star-formation process.



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