Wednesday, January 8, 2014

ScienceDaily: Astronomy News

ScienceDaily: Astronomy News

Giant sunspot, larger than Earth's diameter, appears on sun

Posted: 07 Jan 2014 06:55 PM PST

An enormous sunspot, labeled AR1944, slipped into view over the sun's left horizon late on Jan. 1, 2014. The sunspot steadily moved toward the right, along with the rotation of the sun, and now sits almost dead center, as seen in the image above from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Pandora's magnifying glass: First image from Hubble's Frontier Fields

Posted: 07 Jan 2014 02:09 PM PST

This image of Abell 2744 is the first to come from Hubble's Frontier Fields observing program, which is using the magnifying power of enormous galaxy clusters to peer deep into the distant universe. Abell 2744, nicknamed Pandora's Cluster, is thought to have a very violent history, having formed from a cosmic pile-up of multiple galaxy clusters.

Out-of-this-world first light images emerge from Gemini Planet Imager

Posted: 07 Jan 2014 02:09 PM PST

After nearly a decade of development, construction and testing, the world's most advanced instrument for directly imaging and analyzing planets orbiting around other stars is pointing skyward and collecting light from distant worlds.

Stormy stars? Probing weather on brown dwarfs

Posted: 07 Jan 2014 02:06 PM PST

Swirling, stormy clouds may be ever-present on cool celestial orbs called brown dwarfs. New observations suggest that most brown dwarfs are roiling with one or more planet-size storms akin to Jupiter's "Great Red Spot."

Hubble unveils a deep sea of small and faint early galaxies

Posted: 07 Jan 2014 01:37 PM PST

Scientists have long suspected there must be a hidden population of small, faint galaxies that were responsible during the universe's early years for producing a majority of stars now present in the cosmos. At last Hubble has found them in the deepest ultraviolet-light exposures made of the early universe. This underlying population is 100 times more abundant in the universe than their more massive cousins that were detected previously.

Ultra-bright young galaxies discovered

Posted: 07 Jan 2014 01:37 PM PST

Astronomers have discovered and characterized four unusually bright galaxies as they appeared more than 13 billion years ago, just 500 million years after the big bang. Although Hubble has previously identified galaxies at this early epoch, astronomers were surprised to find objects that are about 10 to 20 times more luminous than anything seen previously.

Thousands of unseen, faraway galaxies discovered

Posted: 07 Jan 2014 01:37 PM PST

The first of a set of unprecedented, super-deep views of the universe contain images of some of the intrinsically faintest and youngest galaxies ever detected. This is just the first of several primary target fields in The Frontier Fields program. The immense gravity in this foreground galaxy cluster, Abell 2744, warps space to brighten and magnify images of far-more-distant background galaxies as they looked over 12 billion years ago, not long after the big bang.

Rare eclipsing double asteroid discovered

Posted: 07 Jan 2014 06:33 AM PST

Students in an undergraduate astronomy class made a discovery that wowed professional astronomers: a previously unstudied asteroid is actually a pair of asteroids that orbit and eclipse one another. Fewer than 100 binary eclipsing asteroids have been found in the main asteroid belt.

NASA's Fermi makes first gamma-ray study of a gravitational lens

Posted: 06 Jan 2014 04:01 PM PST

Astronomers have made the first-ever gamma-ray measurements of a gravitational lens, a kind of natural telescope formed when a rare cosmic alignment allows the gravity of a massive object to bend and amplify light from a more distant source.
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