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.

GRAIL mission maps Moon’s gravity

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Late last year, a pair of spacecraft completed their mission to probe the hidden inner structure of the Moon by precisely mapping out its gravitational field.  The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission revealed details and features that had never been seen before like tectonic structures, volcanic landforms, basin rings, crater central peaks and many simple bowl-shaped structures. The GRAIL mission worked by sending two small spacecraft (GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B) into the same orbit around the Moon, each about … Continue reading →

Two supermassive black holes

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Just as we all settled down and accepted the idea that most (if not all) galaxies have super-massive black holes at their cores, x-ray telescopes in orbit have found a galaxy with two.  NGC 3758 (also catalogued as Markarian 739) is 425 million light years away, in the constellation Leo. We’ve known about one of the black holes in this galaxy for quite a while.  It was something of a textbook case, with the black hole actively attracting a large … Continue reading →

Green Bean Galaxies

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Astronomers working with European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescopes have discovered an incredibly rare class of galaxy, known as Green Bean galaxies, for their distinctive and unusual colour. While Astronomer Mischa Schirmer of the Gemini Observatory was searching for distant galaxy clusters, he came across an object in an image from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope that made no sense: it looked like a galaxy, but it was bright green.  After reporting his find, he was granted special observing time at short notice … Continue reading →

Galaxies could get the Pluto treatment

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The great galaxy in Andromeda It seems strange that a field as dynamic and old as Astronomy should be burdened with so many sloppy definitions.  It’s a consequence of the rapid advancement of the field, where each new instrument yanks aside yet another curtain to reveal previously unimagined objects that challenge established models.  Common terms, like ‘Galaxy’ and ‘Planet’ get coined as casual labels to describe vaguely understood lights in the sky, and then as our understanding deepens we find … Continue reading →

Milky Way surrounded by hot gas

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Recent observations by NASA’s Chandra have found much of the Milky Way’s missing mass in the form of a vast halo surrounding the galaxy. It has been known for many decades that the amount of material which we can see in a galaxy is not enough to account for the speeds at which various stars and clouds orbit the centre. Objects towards the edge should move slowly and objects near the core should move rapidly, which is what we observe … Continue reading →