| The center of the Milky Way presents astronomers with a paradox: it holds young stars, but no one is sure how those stars got there. |
| The galactic center is wracked with powerful gravitational tides stirred by a 4 million solar-mass black hole. Those tides should rip apart molecular clouds that act as stellar nurseries, preventing stars from forming in place. Yet the alternative ” stars falling inward after forming elsewhere ” should be a rare occurrence. |
| Using the Very Large Array of radio telescopes, astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy have identified two protostars located only a few light-years from the galactic center. Their discovery shows that stars can, in fact, form very close to the Milky Way’s central black hole. |
| A British museum curator has built a working replica of a 2,000-year-old Greek machine that has been called the world’s first computer. |
A dictionary-size assemblage of 37 interlocking dials crafted with the precision and complexity of a 19th-century Swiss clock, the Antikythera mechanism was used for modeling and predicting the movements of the heavenly bodies as well as the dates and locations of upcoming Olympic games. |
The original 81 shards of the Antikythera were recovered from under the sea (near the Greek island of Antikythera) in 1902, rusted and clumped together in a nearly indecipherable mass. Scientists dated it to 150 B.C. Such craftsmanship wouldn’t be seen for another 1,000 years ” but its purpose was a mystery for decades.
Many scientists have worked since the 1950s to piece together the story, with the help of some very sophisticated imaging technology in recent years, including X-ray and gamma-ray imaging and 3-D computer modeling. See more at spacecollective.org |
| two separate research teams announced today that they have taken the first pictures of exoplanets, planets orbiting stars beyond the edge of our solar system. It’s an achievement that has long been considered vital in the search for planets like our own |
| One team spotted a single planet circling a bright star only 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus, while the other detected three giant planets orbiting a star 130 light-years away in the Pegasus constellation. |
| More than 300 so-called extrasolar planets have been found circling distant stars, making their discovery the hottest and fastest growing field in astronomy. |
| But the observations have been made mostly indirectly |
| The Hubble Space Telescope is back in business with a snapshot of the fascinating galaxy pair Arp 147. |
| Just a couple of days after the orbiting observatory was brought back online, Hubble aimed its prime working camera, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), at a particularly intriguing target, a pair of gravitationally interacting galaxies called Arp 147. |
| The image demonstrated that the camera is working exactly as it was before going offline, thereby scoring a “perfect 10″ both for performance and beauty. |
| And literally “10″ for appearance too, due to the chance alignment of the two galaxies. The left-most galaxy, or the “one” in this image, is relatively undisturbed, apart from a smooth ring of starlight. |
| The right-most galaxy, the “zero” of the pair, exhibits a clumpy, blue ring of intense star formation. |
| Despite thousands of years of research, astronomers know next to nothing about how the universe is structured. |
| One strong and accepted theory is that large galaxies are clustered together on structures similar to giant soap bubbles, with tinier galaxies sprinkled on the surface of this “soapy” layer. |
| A team led by Dr. Noah Brosch, Director of the Tel Aviv University-owned Wise Observatory, is the first in the world to uncover what they believe are visible traces of a “filament” of dark matter – an entity on which galaxies meet, cluster and form. A filament can originate at the junction of two “soap bubbles,” where the thin membrane is thicker. |
| studied an area of the sky opposite the constellation Virgo, where 14 galaxies were forming in a line. Pundits have called the line a “Bridge to Nowhere” because it seems to start and end in unknown locations. Strangely, 13 of these galaxies were simultaneously giving birth to new stars.See more at www.sciencedaily.com |
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