Category Archives: News and Updates

News about Astronomy and Space Science. Find every news item and update here, in blog format. You can get these updates sent straight to your mailbox by subscribing here, or you can subscribe to the RSS feed by clicking the link.

Hubble Finds Water on Worlds Beyond Solar System

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Two teams of scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope to study the atmospheres of planets orbiting distant stars have found water on five of them, proving that our Solar System is not the only place where an abundance of the life-giving liquid can be found. The exoplanets in question are WASP-17b, HD209458b, WASP-12b, WASP-19b, and XO-1b, and are all “Hot Jupiters”, meaning that they are very large gas giants orbiting extremely close to their parent stars.  The first two planets … Continue reading →

LADEE mission studying the Moon’s atmosphere

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Most people would be surprised to learn that the Moon has an atmosphere, or that NASA scientists want to monitor how badly we’ve polluted it, but that’s exactly what the new LADEE mission is trying to find out. Launched in November last year, the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) is currently in orbit around the moon studying its tenuous atmosphere to understand why there is so much dust levitating above the surface, and how rocket engine emissions are … Continue reading →

Chandra finds Black Hole at the centre of the Milky Way spraying high-energy jet of particles

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Galaxies around the universe are now known to have supermassive black holes at their cores, and these SMBH’s are known for their powerful jets of high energy partcicles streaming away along their north and south poles.  Recently, the Chandra X-ray space telescope has been peering through the dense wall of gas and dust which lies between us and our own SMBH, and has finally confirmed that we too have one of these vast jets in our own Milky Way galaxy.High … Continue reading →

MAVEN mission to study martian atmosphere

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Over the past ten years, the various robotic rovers crawling across the surface of Mars have confirmed one fact beyond any doubt: A long time ago, Mars was a warm, wet planet with a thick atmosphere that could easily have supported life.  Yet today it is a frozen, barren, dry world with an atmosphere so thin that the any human explorers will need to wear pressurised space suits. So where did all the air go?  NASA’s new MAVEN mission was … Continue reading →

What the Milky Way looked like billions of years ago

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Astronomers working with the Hubble Space Telescope have studied hundreds of thousands of galaxies, to improve their understanding of how galaxies are born and change over time. These new results have allowed them to construct a model of what the Milky Way would have looked like shortly after it was first formed, between seven and 11 billion years ago.A team of astronomers led by Pieter G. van Dokkum of Yale University and Shannon Patel of Leiden University has shed light … Continue reading →