The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), affectionately known as Curiosity, has been on Mars for over a year now.  It made a dramatic landing, it captured our imagination by being a huge nuclear-powered laser tank, and it has returned some of the most stunning high-resolution imagery of Mars ever recorded.  But NASA don’t spend billions of dollars on projects just because they’re “Cool”.  They have definite scientific goals in mind; to advance our knowledge of worlds beyond Earth and answer basic … Continue reading →

Back in 1972, radio astronomers discovered  vast elongated cloud of gas arcing across the entire sky.  Long enough to stretch from horizon to horizon, the only clue as to its origins were that it seemed thickest around the Large and Small Magellanic clouds (LMC and SMC).  Over time, increasingly sophisticated computer models suggested that the gas had been dragged out of the Magellanic Clouds by the Milky Way’s gravity after a series of close encounters between the different galaxies.  It … Continue reading →

Observations by the Chandra X-ray observatory have helped scientists to find the youngest X-ray binary star ever discovered. X-ray binary stars are some of the brightest objects in the sky, when viewed in the X-ray spectrum, and are formed when one member of a binary star system dies in a violent supernova explosion. At only 4500 years old, Circinus X-1 is one of the youngest astronomical objects of any kind known to humanity.