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.

Water Found Below the Surface of the Moon

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In 2009, the first evidence of water on the Moon was discovered in mineralogical data collected by the Indian Space Research Organisation’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, which identified water molecules on the polar caps of the Moon. The current thinking is that the thin layers of ice are caused by solar winds buffeting the surface of the moon. Although this was a ground-breaking discovery in itself, the real search (and very hard from lunar orbit) has been for “magmatic water”, meaning water … Continue reading →

Galaxy Observed Replenishing Gas Reserves

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This artist’s impression shows a galaxy in the distant Universe, just two billion years after the Big Bang, in the process of pulling in cool gas (shown in orange) from its surroundings. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/ESA/AOES Medialab Astronomers have recently caught a distant galaxy in the act of consuming a vast cloud of primeval gas, allowing it to kick off a new round of star formation and increase its own lifespan. It’s long been suspected that galaxies can do this, but … Continue reading →

Nearby Star has Three Planets in Habitable Zone

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Astronomers studying Gliese 667C, a nearby star in the constellation Scorpius, have expanded on previous observations to find that it has at least 6 planets, with three of them in the habitable zone. These three are all super-Earths, meaning that they’re rocky planets that are several times the size of Earth.  The habitable zone around a star is the distance at which the range of possible temperatures allows for a planet to have liquid water, although this does not guarantee … Continue reading →

Announcing Starmap Media

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A press release landed in my inbox this morning from the folks at Starmap letting me know about the new Starmap Media functionality they’ve added to their products.  As somebody who’d never used (or even heard of) it, I felt I need to have a closer look and ran into an immediate problem: It’s for iPad and iPhone only.  I’m an Android guy.  Looks like I’ll have to wait for the next chance to launch into product reviews. That hiccup … Continue reading →

Dusty Surprise Around Supermassive Black Hole

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Astronomers studying a giant black hole have found that it is surrounding by vast clouds of cold dust that nobody expected to see. Observations made with the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) in Chile showed that, instead of being arranged in a huge torus (doughnut shape) swirling into the black hole, it fills the areas above and below the torus region, and is being blown outwards. Supermassive Black Holes (SMBH), containing the mass of millions or … Continue reading →