About 2,000 light-years away from Earth, there is a star catapulting toward the edge of the Milky Way. This particular star, known as LP 40?365, is one of a unique breed of fast-moving stars — remnant pieces of massive white dwarf stars — that have survived in chunks after aContinuar Leyendo
Maunakea, Hawaii, August 02, 2021.- Jupiter may be the bully planet of our solar system because it’s the most massive planet, but it’s actually a runt compared to many of the giant planets found around other stars. These alien worlds, called super-Jupiters, weigh up to 13 times Jupiter’s mass. AstronomersContinuar Leyendo
Solar Orbiter and BepiColombo are set to make space history with two Venus flybys just 33 hours apart on 9 and 10 August. The two spacecraft need the gravitational swingby to help them lose a little orbital energy in order to reach their destinations towards the centre of the SolarContinuar Leyendo
The black holes at the centres of galaxies are the most mysterious objects in the Universe, not only because of the huge quantities of material within them, millions of times the mass of the Sun, but because of the incredibly dense concentration of matter in a volume no bigger thanContinuar Leyendo
On Aug. 26, 2020, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a pulse of high-energy radiation that had been racing toward Earth for nearly half the present age of the universe. Lasting only about a second, it turned out to be one for the record books — the shortest gamma-ray burstContinuar Leyendo
París, July 27, 2021.- Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is the largest moon — and the ninth-largest object — in the Solar System. It may hold more water than all of Earth’s oceans, but temperatures there are so cold that water on the surface freezes and the ocean lies roughly 160 kilometresContinuar Leyendo
A team at the Natural History Museum (NHM), London is paving the way for future rovers to search for meteorites on Mars. The scientists are using the NHM’s extensive meteorite collection to test the spectral instruments destined for the ExoMars rover Rosalind Franklin, and develop tools to identify meteorites onContinuar Leyendo
París, July 18, 2021.- A team of astronomers has released new observations of nearby galaxies that resemble colourful cosmic fireworks. The images, obtained with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), show different components of the galaxies in distinct colours, allowing astronomers to pinpoint the locations of youngContinuar Leyendo
Palomar 5 is a unique star cluster. This is firstly because it is one of the «fluffiest» clusters in the halo of our Galaxy, with the average distance between the stars being a few light-years, comparable to the distance from the Sun to the nearest star. Secondly, it has aContinuar Leyendo
A new study disputes the prevailing hypothesis on why Mercury has a big core relative to its mantle (the layer between a planet’s core and crust). For decades, scientists argued that hit-and-run collisions with other bodies during the formation of our solar system blew away much of Mercury’s rocky mantleContinuar Leyendo
