Hubble fortuitously discovers a new galaxy in the cosmic neighborhood

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Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to study some of the oldest and faintest stars in the globular cluster NGC 6752 have made an unexpected finding. They discovered a dwarf galaxy in our cosmic backyard, only 30 million light-years away.
via Science Daily
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Mars rover Curiosity makes first gravity-measuring traverse on the Red Planet

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A clever use of non-science engineering data from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has let a team of researchers to measure the density of rock layers in Gale Crater.
via Science Daily
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Detailed maps of thousands of nearby galaxies

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The latest data release from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) includes observations revealing the internal structure and composition of nearly 5,000 nearby galaxies observed during the first three years of a program called Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory.
via Science Daily
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Missing-link in planet evolution found

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For the first time ever, astronomers have detected a 1.3 km radius body at the edge of the Solar System. Kilometer sized bodies like the one discovered have been predicted to exist for more than 70 years. These objects acted as an important step in the planet formation process between small initial amalgamations of dust and ice and the planets we see today.
via Science Daily
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To catch a wave, rocket launches from top of world

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On Jan. 4, 2019, at 4:37 a.m. EST the CAPER-2 mission launched from Norway. The rocket flew through active aurora borealis, or northern lights, to study the waves that accelerate electrons into our atmosphere.
via Science Daily
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Stars shrouded in iron dust

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Astronomers have found a group of stars very poor in metals and shrouded in a high fraction of iron dust, situated in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
via Science Daily
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Brain condition related to long-term spaceflights needs more attention, data

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More people are poised to explore space than ever before; those who do will experience the effects of microgravity on the human body.
via Science Daily
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Environmental protection in outer space?

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Should regulations for environmental protection be valid beyond our solar system? Currently, extra-terrestrial forms of life are only deemed worth protecting if they can be scientifically investigated. But what about the numerous, presumably lifeless planets whose oxygen atmospheres open up the possibility of their settlement by terrestrial life forms?
via Science Daily
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Where is Earth's submoon?

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Juna Kollmeier and Sean Raymond kicked off an internet firestorm late last year when they posted a draft of their article about submoons on a preprint server. The online conversation obsessed over the best term to describe such phenomena. But nomenclature was not the point of Kollmeier and Raymond's investigation, who set out to define the physical parameters for moons that would be capable of being stably orbited by other, smaller moons.
via Science Daily
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Stellar winds, the source material for the universe, are clumpy

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Data recorded by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory of a neutron star as it passed through a dense patch of stellar wind emanating from its massive companion star provide valuable insight about the structure and composition of stellar winds.
via Science Daily
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How to escape a black hole: Simulations provide new clues about powerful plasma jets

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New simulations have combined decades-old theories to provide new insight about the driving mechanisms in plasma jets that allows them to steal energy from black holes' powerful gravitational fields and propel it far from their gaping mouths.
via Science Daily
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Making the Hubble's deepest images even deeper

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It has taken researchers almost three years to produce the deepest image of the Universe ever taken from space, by recovering a large quantity of 'lost' light around the largest galaxies in the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field.
via Science Daily
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Prolonged spaceflight could weaken astronauts' immune systems

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Researchers report impaired NK-cell function during long-duration space travel.
via Science Daily
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Seeing double could help resolve dispute about how fast the universe is expanding

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How fast the universe is expanding has been puzzling astronomers for almost a century. Different studies keep coming up with different answers -- which has some researchers wondering if they've overlooked a key mechanism in the machinery that drives the cosmos. Now, by pioneering a new way to measure how quickly the cosmos is expanding, astronomers have taken a step toward resolving the debate.
via Science Daily
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Shedding light on Saturn's moon Titan's mysterious atmosphere

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A new study tackles one of the greatest mysteries about Titan, one of Saturn's moons: the origin of its thick, nitrogen-rich atmosphere. The study posits that one key to Titan's mysterious atmosphere is the 'cooking' of organic material in the moon's interior.
via Science Daily
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How hot are atoms in the shock wave of an exploding star?

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A new method to measure the temperature of atoms during the explosive death of a star will help scientists understand the shock wave that occurs as a result of this supernova explosion.
via Science Daily
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A fleeting moment in time: Last breath of a dying star

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The faint, ephemeral glow emanating from the planetary nebula ESO 577-24 persists for only a short time -- around 10,000 years, a blink of an eye in astronomical terms. ESO's Very Large Telescope captured this shell of glowing ionized gas -- the last breath of the dying star whose simmering remains are visible at the heart of this image. As the gaseous shell of this planetary nebula expands and grows dimmer, it will slowly disappear from sight.
via Science Daily
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Waves in Saturn's rings give precise measurement of planet's rotation rate

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Saturn's distinctive rings were observed in unprecedented detail by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, and scientists have now used those observations to probe the interior of the giant planet and obtain the first precise determination of its rotation rate. The length of a day on Saturn, according to their calculations, is 10 hours 33 minutes and 38 seconds.
via Science Daily
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Scientists find increase in asteroid impacts on ancient Earth by studying the Moon

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A team of scientists has determined the number of asteroid impacts on the Moon and Earth increased by two to three times starting around 290 million years ago. Previous theories held that there were fewer craters on both objects dating back to before that time because they had disappeared due to erosion. The new findings claim that there were simply fewer asteroid impacts during that earlier period.
via Science Daily
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Saturn hasn't always had rings

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In its last days, the Cassini spacecraft looped between Saturn and its rings so that Earth-based radio telescopes could track the gravitational tug of each. Scientists have now used these measurements to determine the mass of the rings and estimate its age, which is young: 10-100 million years. This supports the hypothesis that the rings are rubble from a comet or Kuiper Belt object captured late in Saturn's history.
via Science Daily
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High-speed supernova reveals earliest moments of a dying star

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An international team of researchers found evidence for the much theorized 'hot cocoon'.
via Science Daily
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New way supermassive black holes are 'fed'

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A new study finds that some supermassive black holes are 'triggered' to grow, suddenly devouring a large amount of gas in their surroundings.
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The orderly chaos of black holes

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During the formation of a black hole a bright burst of very energetic light in the form of gamma-rays is produced, these events are called gamma-ray bursts. Researchers have built the POLAR instrument to analyze gamma-ray bursts. The first results of POLAR reveal that the high energy photons coming from gamma-ray bursts are neither completely chaotic, nor completely organized, but a mixture of the two.
via Science Daily
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Birth of a black hole or neutron star captured for first time

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After combining several imaging sources, including hard X-rays and radiowaves, a team now speculates that the telescopes captured the exact moment a star collapsed to form a compact object, such as a black hole or neutron star. The stellar debris, approaching and swirling around the object's event horizon, caused The Cow's remarkably bright glow.
via Science Daily
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Astronomers find signatures of a 'messy' star that made its companion go supernova

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Astronomers announced that they have identified the type of companion star that made its partner in a binary system, a carbon-oxygen white dwarf star, explode. Through repeated observations of SN 2015cp, a supernova 545 million light years away, the team detected hydrogen-rich debris that the companion star had shed prior to the explosion.
via Science Daily
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Cosmic telescope zooms in on the beginning of time

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Observations from Gemini Observatory identify a key fingerprint of an extremely distant quasar, allowing astronomers to sample light emitted from the dawn of time. Astronomers happened upon this deep glimpse into space and time thanks to a foreground galaxy acting as a gravitational lens, which magnified the ancient light. The Gemini observations provide critical pieces of the puzzle in confirming this object as the brightest appearing quasar so early in the history of the universe.
via Science Daily
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X-ray pulse detected near event horizon as black hole devours star

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New findings are the first demonstration of a tidal disruption flare being used to estimate a black hole's spin.
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Lifting the veil on star formation in the Orion Nebula

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Astronomers describe their discovery that stellar wind from a newborn star in the Orion Nebula is preventing more stars from forming nearby.
via Science Daily
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Long-duration space missions have lasting effects on spinal muscles

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Astronauts who spend several months on the International Space Station have significant reductions in the size and density of paraspinal muscles of the trunk after returning to Earth, reports a new study.
via Science Daily
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Astronomers observe evolution of a black hole as it wolfs down stellar material

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On March 11, an instrument aboard the International Space Station detected an enormous explosion of X-ray light that grew to be six times as bright as the Crab Nebula, nearly 10,000 light years away from Earth. Scientists determined the source was a black hole caught in the midst of an outburst -- an extreme phase in which a black hole can spew brilliant bursts of X-ray energy as it devours an avalanche of gas and dust from a nearby star.
via Science Daily
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First evidence of gigantic remains from star explosions

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Astrophysicists have found the first ever evidence of gigantic remains being formed from repeated explosions on the surface of a dead star in the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.5 million light years from Earth. The remains or 'super-remnant' measures almost 400 light years across. The super-remnant -- larger than almost all known remnants of supernova explosions -- is consistent with being built up by frequent nova eruptions over millions of years.
via Science Daily
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Astronomers map 'light echoes' of newly discovered black hole

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A team of astronomers has charted the environment surrounding a relatively small, 'stellar mass' black hole that is 10 times the mass of the sun. The observations provide the clearest picture to date of how these small black holes consume matter and emit energy.
via Science Daily
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Canada's CHIME telescope detects second repeating fast radio burst

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Scientists have found the second repeating fast radio burst (FRB) ever recorded. The discovery of the extragalactic signal is among the first, eagerly awaited results from the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME). The repeating FRB was one of a total of 13 bursts detected over a period of just three weeks during the summer of 2018, while CHIME was in its pre-commissioning phase.
via Science Daily
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A survey machine and a data trove: Dark Energy Survey's rich legacy

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On the night of Jan. 9, 2019, the V. M. Blanco 4-meter telescope at the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), high in the mountains of Chile, will close the camera's shutter on the final image from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) -- a survey that has mapped 5,000 square degrees of the heavens, almost one-quarter of the southern sky.
via Science Daily
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Nature's magnifying glass reveals unexpected intermediate mass exoplanets

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Astronomers have found a new exoplanet that could alter the standing theory of planet formation. With a mass that's between that of Neptune and Saturn, and its location beyond the 'snow line' of its host star, an alien world of this scale was supposed to be rare.
via Science Daily
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Space microbes aren't so alien after all

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A new study has found that -- despite its seemingly harsh conditions -- the ISS is not causing bacteria to mutate into dangerous, antibiotic-resistant superbugs. The bacteria are instead simply responding, and perhaps evolving, to survive in a stressful environment.
via Science Daily
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TESS discovers its third new planet, with longest orbit yet

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NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS, has discovered a third small planet outside our solar system, scientists report.
via Science Daily
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Hubble takes gigantic image of the Triangulum Galaxy

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The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the most detailed image yet of a close neighbor of the Milky Way -- the Triangulum Galaxy, a spiral galaxy located at a distance of only three million light-years. This panoramic survey of the third-largest galaxy in our Local Group of galaxies provides a mesmerizing view of the 40 billion stars that make up one of the most distant objects visible to the naked eye.
via Science Daily
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Tiny satellites could be 'guide stars' for huge next-generation telescopes

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Researchers design CubeSats with lasers to provide steady reference light for telescopes investigating distant planets.
via Science Daily
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New nanosatellite system captures better imagery at lower cost

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Researchers have developed a new satellite imaging system that could revolutionize the economics and imagery available from space-based cameras and even earth-based telescopes.
via Science Daily
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New Ultima Thule discoveries from NASA's New Horizons

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Data from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which explored Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule earlier this week, is yielding scientific discoveries daily.
via Science Daily
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NASA's New Horizons mission reveals entirely new kind of world

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Scientists from NASA's New Horizons mission released the first detailed images of the most distant object ever explored -- the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule. Its remarkable appearance, unlike anything we've seen before, illuminates the processes that built the planets four and a half billion years ago.
via Science Daily
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Juno mission captures images of volcanic plumes on Jupiter's moon Io

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The Juno spacecraft captured new images of a volcanic plume on Jupiter's moon Io during a December 21 flyby. JunoCam, the Stellar Reference Unit (SRU), the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM), and the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVS) observed Io for over an hour, providing a glimpse of the moon's polar regions as well as evidence of an active eruption.
via Science Daily
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New Horizons successfully explores Ultima Thule

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NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past Ultima Thule in the early hours of New Year's Day, ushering in the era of exploration from the enigmatic Kuiper Belt, a region of primordial objects that holds keys to understanding the origins of the solar system.
via Science Daily
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New Horizons spacecraft homing in on Kuiper Belt target

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Only hours from completing a historic flyby of Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, nicknamed Ultima Thule, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is on course and ready to gather scientific data on the small object's geology, composition, atmosphere and more. Closest approach takes place in the early morning hours of New Year's Day -- 12:33 a.m. EST -- marking the event as the most distant exploration of worlds ever completed by humankind.
via Science Daily
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