ESA’s CHEOPS Just Launched. We’re About to Learn a LOT More About Exoplanets
The CHEOPS mission is underway. On December 18th, the exoplanet-studying spacecraft launched from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana aboard a Soyuz-Fregat rocket. Initial signals from CHEOPS show that the launch was a success. CHEOPS stands for the Characterizing Exoplanet Satellite. It’s a partnership between ESA and Switzerland, with 10 other EU states contributing. Its […]
100,000 Supernovae Exploded Near the Core of the Milky Way
Thanks to the latest generation of sophisticated telescopes, astronomers are learning things a great deal about our Universe. The improved resolution and observational power of these instruments also allow astronomers to address previously unanswered questions. Many of these telescopes can be found in the Atacama Desert in Chile, where atmospheric interference is minimal and the […]
Planet Hunters TESS Mobile: swipe right for planets
It has been an extremely exciting year for Planter Hunters TESS and we have identified multiple potential new planetary systems. Due to the success of the project, we have decided to expand by bringing PHT to your mobile device! To date, all of the data that we have looked at have been from the targeted […]
Are galactic spiral arms traffic jams or do they wind up? The evidence is… polarizing.
Why do spiral galaxies have spiral arms? This is a question that I figured had been solved decades ago. I wrote about this in a post about spiral arms from July 2019: More Bad Astronomy You might think spiral arms form because, due to gravity, stars close in to the center of the galaxy orbit […]
The 'cores' of massive galaxies had already formed 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang
Dec 19, 2019 (Nanowerk News) A distant galaxy more massive than our Milky Way — with more than a trillion stars — has revealed that the ‘cores’ of massive galaxies in the Universe had formed already 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, about 1 billion years earlier than previous measurements revealed. Researchers published their […]
NASA GISMO Reveals 1,000 Trillion Mile Long Cosmic ‘Candy Cane’ in Milky Way
The central zone of our galaxy hosts the Milky Way’s largest, densest collection of giant molecular clouds, raw material for making tens of millions of stars. This image combines archival infrared (blue), radio (red) and new microwave observations (green) from the Goddard-developed GISMO instrument. The composite image reveals emission from cold dust, areas of vigorous […]
Science Fiction Might Be Right After All. There Might Be Breathable Atmospheres Across the Universe
The last few years has seen an explosion of exoplanet discoveries. Some of those worlds are in what we deem the “habitable zone,” at least in preliminary observations. But how many of them will have life-supporting, oxygen-rich atmospheres in the same vein as Earth’s? A new study suggests that breathable atmospheres might not be as […]
Mars Has Auroras Too, We Just Can’t See Them
Our eyes can’t see them, but Martian auroras are there, and more commonplace than we once thought. The Martian auroras were first discovered in 2016 by NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft. Now some new results are expanding our knowledge of these unusual auroras. Most Universe Today readers know about Earth’s auroras and how they’re created. When a […]