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Space News Feeds
Universe Today
Space and Astronomy News from Universe Today

  • The Dark Energy Camera's New Image is Reminiscent of van Gogh

    The 570 megapixel Dark Energy Camera captured this image of the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud. It's one of the nearest star forming regions to Earth. R Coronae Australis, a variable binary system, lights up the orange cloud on the left. Dust lanes, newborn stars, and nebulae fill the frame. The globular cluster NGC 6723 is prominent in the upper right, though it's much farther away than Corona Australis. Image Credit: Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA.  Image processing: R. Colombari & M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab)

    The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) has a massive 570 megapixel camera, and its new image is of the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud. Corona Australis is one of the closest star-forming regions to Earth. It's not as well-studied as the Orion Molecular Cloud or Ophiuchus, but as DECam's new iage of Corona Australis shows, it's just as fascinating.



  • What's It Like to Travel Near the Speed of Light? Part 4: The Hot View

    A Saturn V rocket accelerates off the pad. Sustained acceleration is exactly what conjures the faint quantum glow of Unruh radiation. Credit: NASA (public domain).

    An accelerating observer finds their empty vacuum glowing with real particles, a bizarre effect called Unruh radiation. It's a cousin to Hawking radiation, but with no black hole required, just a rocket and its throttle.



  • The Roman Space Telescope Will Find Ancient Black Holes By Watching How They Eat Stars

    This artist's illustration shows a supermassive black hole (SMBH) tearing apart a star that got too close in a tidal disruption event. These events flare brightly, making otherwise invisible black holes visible. Astrophysicists want to find more of these events across cosmic time so they can understand how SMBH have become so massive. The upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will find many more of them. Image Credit: NASA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)

    When supermassive black holes (SMBH) in a certain mass range eat a star, they first tear it apart in a Tidal Disruption Event (TDE). By detecting TDE across cosmic time, astronomers can chart the growth of SMBH as the Universe aged. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help, by finding about 100 TDEs every year.



  • Scientists are Teaching Shrimp to Eat in Microgravity for Future Moon Bases

    Image of brine shrimp, like those used in the experiments. Credit - Hans Hillewaert / Wikimedia commons

    As far as we know, food doesn?t exist naturally in space. We have to bring it with us if we want to explore the final frontier. One of the oldest and most common types of food on planet Earth is seafood, yet we know surprisingly little about how aquatic animals would react to the microgravity environment they would experience in space. A new paper by researchers at Japan?s Okayama University of Science, which was recently published in Microgravity Science and Technology, hopes to tackle that question. It used a novel way to simulate microgravity to watch how crustaceans would react to the space environment, and found that they could likely be good candidates as part of a future space food chain.



  • What's It Like to Travel Near the Speed of Light? Part 3: The Limited View

    The supermassive black hole in M87, imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope. Its event horizon is the classic one-way boundary in spacetime. Credit: EHT Collaboration (CC BY 4.0).

    Constant acceleration builds a horizon out of nothing but motion, walling off part of the universe forever. Meet Wolfgang Rindler, the coffee date you'll never reach, and the light that can chase you for infinite time without ever catching up.



  • X-Ray Eyes Reveal the Magnetic Secrets of the Lighthouse Pulsar's Cosmic Wake

    False color image of the Lighthouse Pulsar. Credit : X-ray: Chandra: NASA/CXC/Stanford Univ./J.T. Dinsmore et al.; IXPE: NASA/MSFC/J.T. Dinsmore et al., Radio: CSIRO/ATNF/ATCA; Optical: 2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare

    Occasionally, when a massive star dies in a supernova, it can leave behind a dense, rapidly spinning core known as a pulsar. These extreme objects are some of the most fascinating in the universe, and are extremely useful for astronomers when measuring distances or navigating the void of space. A new paper from Jack Dinsmore, a graduate student at Stanford, and his co-authors, and published in The Astrophysical Journal, takes a look at some of the features of one of the most famous examples of a pulsar - PSR J1101-6101, commonly known as the Lighthouse pulsar.



  • FCC Approves First Launch for Space Reflector Constellation

    An artist's conception of Eärendil-1 in orbit. Credit: Reflect Orbital.

    The United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently approved the first test launch of Reflect Orbital?s E�rendil-1 satellite. Sporting an 18 by 18 meter-wide reflector once unfurled, the satellite will test the ability to reflect sunlight back to Earth, on demand. The company envisions more than 50,000 reflectors girding the Earth in low Earth orbit by 2035, while many in the astronomical community have raised concerns on the project's impact.



  • Satellite Images of Pengiun Poo Reveal Climate Change's Impact on the Species

    Nesting Adélie penguins on Antarctica's King George Island. Credit: Michael Polito, UC Santa Cruz

    Researchers utilized 30 years of Landsat satellite imagery to analyze the color and spectral signatures of Ad�lie penguin guano across Antarctica, marking the first time space-based observations have captured food-web and population dynamics at a continental scale.



  • This Exoplanet Hid for 10 Years Before Astronomers Finally Found It

    The ESO's Very Large Telescope captured this image of the Beta Pictoris system. The newly-imaged exoplanet, Beta Pictoris d, is marked with the white arrow. The star Beta Pictoris is shown with the star symbol. Beta Pictoris b is on the left, while the other star in the system, Beta Pictoris c, is not visible. The horizontal band across the star is the debris disk, made of material left over after planet formation. Image Credit: ESO/B. Sutlieff, M. Bonse et al.

    A team of astronomers have discovered a third planet orbiting the star Beta Pictoris. The new planet, Beta Pictoris d, is 100 times fainter than Beta Pictoris b ? the first planet discovered in the same system ? and is among the lightest exoplanets ever to be imaged from the ground. After spotting the planet using the European Southern Observatory?s Very Large Telescope (ESO?s VLT), the team found it had been hiding in archive observations spanning more than a decade.



  • What's It Like to Travel Near the Speed of Light? Part 2: The Warped View

    The arch of the Milky Way. Near lightspeed, all of this starlight would compress into a single blazing disk directly ahead of you. Credit: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

    Move fast enough and the entire universe compresses into a searing, blueshifted cone of light aimed at your face. How relativistic aberration and the Doppler effect warp your view of the cosmos as you approach lightspeed.