http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/ Swinburne Astronomy Online - Astronomy News. en-us Mon, 27 May 2007 01:02:00 +1000 Mon, 27 May 2007 01:01:00 +1000 Texmate http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2007s1.xml#story14 The HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has detected a very dark spot on the surface of Mars that appears to be the entrance to a cavern or cave. Mon, 27 May 2007 01:21:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2007s1.xml#story13 Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have detected a ring of dark matter around the galaxy cluster Cl 0024+17. This is the first time that dark matter has been detected with a unique structure that is different from both the gas and galaxies in the cluster. The results suggest that the ring was formed 1 to 2 billion years ago as a result of a collision with another galaxy cluster. Mon, 20 May 2007 01:21:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2007s1.xml#story12 Astronomers have found one of the oldest stars known to date. The star, HE 1523-0901, is in the Milky Way and is estimated to be 13.2 billion years old. With such an age, it would have formed just 500 million years after the Big Bang and must have formed very early in the life of our very own galaxy. Mon, 13 May 2007 01:21:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2007s1.xml#story11 Are you a cool star in the nice side of a stellar nursery? Want to settle down and form a couple of planets? Well watch out, there are stars out there that could disrupt your plans! Astronomers have used data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to map out planetary "danger zones" - regions where planet formation is disrupted. The results of this mapping indicate that cool stars need to be at least 1.6 light-years away from hot O-type stars if they want any chance of forming planets. Mon, 6 May 2007 01:21:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2007s1.xml#story10 Astronomers have found a new exoplanet around the red dwarf star Gliese 581. Exoplanets have been found around many stars in the past, in fact Gliese 581 is already known to be the home of a 15 Earth-mass planet and an 8 Earth-mass planet. What makes this discovery special is that it is the most Earth-like exoplanet discovered to date. Furthermore, the planet appears to be situated within the habitable zone of the Gliese 581 system - that is, a region in which liquid water, and hence life, could exist. Mon, 30 Apr 2007 01:21:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2007s1.xml#story9 Brown dwarfs, those odd-ball objects that are too small to be stars but too large to be planets, were not thought to be capable of emitting any significant amounts of radio waves. However, a team of astronomers has recently discovered that brown dwarfs, like pulsars, can emit extremely bright pulses of radio waves. Mon, 23 Apr 2007 01:21:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2007s1.xml#story8 The conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day with this - first we had a mysterious hexagon on Saturn, now astronomers have spotted a stunning red square nebula around a dying star. But to quickly quash the conspiracy bandwagon before it gets a foothold, it turns out that the nebula is not all that mysterious after all. The red square is in fact a bipolar nebula formed by a dying star as it spews out its innards from opposite poles in space. What we see are the resulting twin opposed conical cavities as seen exactly side-on. Mon, 16 Apr 2007 01:21:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2007s1.xml#story7 Wouldn't it be amazing to see a double sunset just like those portrayed in science-fiction movies - such as the sunset on Luke Skywalker's home planet Tatooine in the movie "Star Wars - A New Hope". Well, astronomers have used the Spitzer Space Telescope to find that places such as this exist around 40 percent of the close binary star systems that they surveyed. Mon, 9 Apr 2007 01:21:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2007s1.xml#story6 Perhaps Johannes Kepler was onto something when he thought that geometry somehow played an important role in the intricate workings of the Solar System. He eventually gave up on this idea to move onto other (more correct) ideas but recent pictures captured by NASA's Cassini mission would likely have caught his attention. Cassini has taken an image of an odd hexagonally-shaped feature circling the northern pole of Saturn. Mon, 2 Apr 2007 01:21:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2007s1.xml#story5 In these modern times we often take the humble sun for granted and spend much of our time looking at more distant stars. To most of us the sun appears as a never-changing bright disk. In reality, it is a turbulent and dynamic place with explosions that propagate through the different layers of its atmosphere. These release energetic particles and electromagnetic radiation outward into the solar system creating what is known as "space weather". Up until the last century we would have been oblivious to the influence of space weather but today, with our reliance on modern technology, it can disrupt communications, global navigation systems, cause power black-outs and even threaten the lives of astronauts. For this reason there is a great need to better understand the processes that affect space weather. The international spacecraft Hinode is helping researchers with this task by providing detailed observations of the sun in optical, x-ray and ultraviolet wavelengths. Mon, 26 Mar 2007 01:21:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2007s1.xml#story4 ... they're black and they're supermassive to boot! Astronomers have used data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Spitzer Space Telescope and ground-based optical telescopes to complete a census of supermassive black holes in a region within the Bootes constellation. Using this multi-wavelength approach over 1300 of these giants were found but the results have raised doubts about our understanding of the environment that surrounds them. Mon, 19 Mar 2007 01:21:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2007s1.xml#story3 Astronomers have observed evidence of the Yarkovsky-O'Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack effect for the first time since it was first theorised several decades ago! I can just hear you now, jumping up and down with excitement, it's wonderful, it's fantastic, it's incredible, oh my - it's, it's, well, um, hold on - what on (or off) Earth is the Yarkovsky-O'Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack effect? The Yarkovsky-O'Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack effect, simply known as the YORP effect by their friends, is the recoil caused when heat is released from an asteroid or meteoroid surface as it is warmed by the Sun. This incredibly weak force can over millions of years increase or decrease the rate of spin of the object that is undergoing this effect. Mon, 12 Mar 2007 01:20:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2007s1.xml#story2 Now that we've got Comet McNaught out of our (inner solar) system we can turn our attention to some recent successful milestones made by space travellers of a more artificial kind. The speedy New Horizons spacecraft has just made a successful flyby of Jupiter and in the process has received a helpful gravitational boost in its journey toward the dwarf planet Pluto. During the flyby New Horizons took the opportunity to put some of its science instruments to the test and captured a stunning image of an enormous dust plume, more than 240 kilometres high, erupting from the volcano Tvashtar on Jupiter's moon Io. The spacecraft also took images of Jupiter and several of its other moons. Many more images will become available over the following months as they are downloaded from the spacecraft. Mon, 5 Mar 2007 01:20:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2007s1.xml#story1 A spectacular comet, one of the brightest in forty years, graced our skies in mid January of this year. Comet McNaught, known more poetically by its designation C/2006 P1, was discovered fairly recently by Scottish-Australian astronomer Robert H. McNaught on the 7th of August, 2006. Since then it made its way into the inner solar system where it swung past the sun at a distance of only 0.17 AU on January 12th, 2007 - an event that did not go unnoticed by NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) where it appeared so bright that it saturated its camera. From our vantage point on Earth the comet appeared just as spectacular, reaching an estimated maximum apparent magnitude of -6. Comet McNaught is a non-periodic comet so I'm afraid to say that we will never see it again - I sure hope that you all went out to see it while you had the chance! Mon, 26 Feb 2007 01:20:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2006s2.xml#story13 While we normally think of serious collisions resulting in death and destruction, the collision of galaxies results in something altogether different - creation! The NASA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) image of the colliding Antennae galaxies is testament to this - throughout the collision of these two spiral galaxies, billions of stars will be formed. The two galaxies are already dotted with brilliant blue star-forming regions and the pink glow of hot hydrogen gas. Mon, 23 Oct 2006 01:20:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2006s2.xml#story12 The Swift satellite has been used to complete the first census of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) in the local universe. The survey, which scanned the entire sky several times over a nine-month period, found more than 200 AGN, each containing a supermassive black hole at its core. The NASA team involved in the survey are confident that they have detected every active supermassive black hole within 400 million light-years of Earth. Mon, 16 Oct 2006 01:20:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2006s2.xml#story11 NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has recently taken a spectacular image of the Opportunity rover perched on the edge of the massive Victoria crater on Mars. The birds-eye view provides mission controllers an excellent way to plan the rover's exploration of the crater. Mon, 9 Oct 2006 01:20:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2006s2.xml#story10 The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered 16 extrasolar planets in a survey that closely observed 180,000 stars at a distance of 26,000 light-years in the densely populated central bulge of our galaxy. The discovery was made as a result of the Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search (SWEEPS). Mon, 2 Oct 2006 01:20:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2006s2.xml#story9 After six months of training, Swinburne Astronomy Online student Anousheh Ansari lifted off on the 18th of September to become the first female space tourist. Anousheh and her travelling companions, NASA's Michael Lopez-Alegria and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, docked with the International Space Station (ISS) on the 20th of September. Anousheh will spend about eight days aboard the ISS before returning to Earth along with two of the station's current occupants. Mon, 25 Sep 2006 01:20:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2006s2.xml#story8 An international research team has used three years of observations of a double pulsar to show that Einstein's theory of general relativity is correct to within 0.05%. These results are based on measurements of an effect known as the "Shapiro Delay" - where pulses from one pulsar when passing close to the other are delayed by the curvature of space-time. Mon, 18 Sep 2006 01:20:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2006s2.xml#story7 A network of amateur astronomers has discovered a Jupiter-sized extrasolar planet located 500 light years away. What is impressive is that the planet, TrES-2, was discovered using an off-the-shelf 10 cm camera lens! Mon, 11 Sep 2006 01:20:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2006s2.xml#story6 Yesterday, the 366 kg SMART-1 probe was purposefully smashed into the moon and it was all for the good of science - no, really! The event was observed by a number of telescopes around the world in optical, infrared and radio wavelengths. These included the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), Australia's Mount Pleasant Observatory and the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA). The event was also closely observed by many amateur astronomers from all around the world. Mon, 4 Sep 2006 01:20:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2006s2.xml#story5 The state of astronomy sure changes fast! Two weeks back our Solar-System had 9 planets, last week a definition of "planet" being proposed at the IAU would have boosted that number up to at least 12 ... and now it seems that we have only 8! Mon, 28 Aug 2006 01:20:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2006s2.xml#story4 Well, the question is: What is a planet? This has turned out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer because of scientific, cultural and historic issues. Nonetheless, after two years of deliberations, a panel of seven astronomers, writers and historians believe that they have come up with an answer. They believe that ... Mon, 21 Aug 2006 01:20:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2006s2.xml#story3 The Smithsonian's Submillimeter Array (SMA) has found evidence of an hourglass-shaped magnetic field in a star formation region. While this has been long predicted by theory this is the first conclusive evidence of the effect. Mon, 14 Aug 2006 01:20:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2006s2.xml#story2 Scientists have observed a total of 38 galaxy clusters with the Chandra X-ray Observatory to determine the Hubble constant using an independent technique to those used previously. To their relief they found that their results were consistent with previous determinations of the constant. Mon, 7 Aug 2006 01:20:00 +1000 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/astronomynews/astronews2006s2.xml#story1 There's was no let up on the news front over the break so I'll dive straight in with some of the highlights. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has approved new names for Pluto's moons S/2005 P1 and P2 - they are now officially called Nix (the goddess of darkness and night) and Hydra (a monster with the body of a serpent and nine heads). Meanwhile, in light of the discovery of an object larger than Pluto in the outer Solar System, 2003 UB313 (A.K.A. Xena), the IAU will be meeting in August to decide whether our Solar System has 8 or 10 planets. The result of this meeting is sure to stir up some debate and a flurry of updates to astronomy textbooks around the world. Mon, 31 Jul 2006 01:20:00 +1000