ScienceDaily: Astronomy News |
- Sun's magnetic field going to flip soon: 11-year solar cycle wimpy, but peaking
- Curiosity confirms origins of Martian meteorites
- Sky survey captures key details of cosmic explosions
- New survey tools unveil two celestial explosions
- New light on star death: Super-luminous supernovae may be powered by magnetars
- ALMA probes mysteries of jets from giant black holes
- How the largest star known is tearing itself apart
| Sun's magnetic field going to flip soon: 11-year solar cycle wimpy, but peaking Posted: 16 Oct 2013 06:24 PM PDT In a 3-meter diameter hollow aluminum sphere, a physics professor is stirring and heating plasmas to 500,000 degrees Fahrenheit to experimentally mimic the magnetic field-inducing cosmic dynamos at the heart of planets, stars and other celestial bodies. |
| Curiosity confirms origins of Martian meteorites Posted: 16 Oct 2013 10:40 AM PDT Earth's most eminent emissary to Mars has just proven that those rare Martian visitors that sometimes drop in on Earth -- a.k.a. Martian meteorites -- really are from the Red Planet. A key new measurement of Mars' atmosphere by NASA's Curiosity rover provides the most definitive evidence yet of the origins of Mars meteorites while at the same time providing a way to rule out Martian origins of other meteorites. |
| Sky survey captures key details of cosmic explosions Posted: 16 Oct 2013 10:23 AM PDT Developed to help scientists learn more about the complex nature of celestial objects, astronomical surveys have been cataloging the night sky since the beginning of the 20th century. The iPTF started searching the skies for certain types of stars and related phenomena in February. Since its inception, iPTF has been extremely successful in the early discovery and rapid follow-up studies of transients, and two recent papers by iPTF astronomers describe first-time detections. |
| New survey tools unveil two celestial explosions Posted: 16 Oct 2013 10:22 AM PDT A team of researchers used a novel astronomical survey software system -- the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) -- to link a new stripped-envelope supernova, named iPTF13bvn, to the star from which it exploded. The iPTF team also pinpointed the first afterglow of an explosion called a gamma-ray burst that was found by the Fermi satellite. |
| New light on star death: Super-luminous supernovae may be powered by magnetars Posted: 16 Oct 2013 10:21 AM PDT Astronomers have shed new light on the rarest and brightest exploding stars ever discovered in the universe. Their research proposes that the brightest exploding stars, called super-luminous supernovae, are powered by magnetars -- small and incredibly dense neutron stars, with gigantic magnetic fields, that spin hundreds of times a second. |
| ALMA probes mysteries of jets from giant black holes Posted: 16 Oct 2013 07:04 AM PDT Astronomers have focused on jets from the huge black holes at the centers of galaxies and observe how they affect their surroundings. They have now obtained the best view yet of the molecular gas around a nearby, quiet black hole and caught an unexpected glimpse of the base of a powerful jet close to a distant black hole. |
| How the largest star known is tearing itself apart Posted: 16 Oct 2013 07:03 AM PDT Astronomers have observed part of the final death throes of the largest known star in the Universe as it throws off its outer layers. The discovery is a vital step in understanding how massive stars return enriched material to the interstellar medium - the space between stars - which is necessary for forming planetary systems. |
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