Interesting Science News

Latest Science News Stories That We Found Interesting

Archive for the ‘Astronomy’ Category

Huge Hole in the Cosmos Disappears

By admin • May 15th, 2008 • Category: Astronomy

NOW you see it, now you don’t. A giant hole in the cosmos that shocked astrophysicists last year may not exist after all. A re-examination of the area has found that the ‘void’, which supposedly contained far fewer stars and galaxies than expected, could be a statistical artefact.
The apparent void was spotted by Lawrence Rudnick […]

Popularity: 5% [?]



Did the Solar System Bounce Finish the Dinosaurs?

By admin • May 3rd, 2008 • Category: Astronomy

The sun’s movement through the Milky Way regularly sends comets hurtling into the inner solar system – coinciding with mass life extinctions on earth, a new study claims.
Scientists at the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology built a computer model of our solar system’s movement and found that it “bounces” up and down through the plane of […]

Popularity: 16% [?]



Galaxies Gone Wild!

By admin • Apr 25th, 2008 • Category: Astronomy

Interacting galaxies are found throughout the Universe, sometimes as dramatic collisions that trigger bursts of star formation, on other occasions as stealthy mergers that result in new galaxies. A series of 59 new images of colliding galaxies has been released from the several terabytes of archived raw images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to […]

Popularity: 18% [?]



Secrets of Massive Black Hole

By admin • Apr 24th, 2008 • Category: Astronomy

At the cores of many galaxies, supermassive black holes expel powerful jets of particles at nearly the speed of light. Just how they perform this feat has long been one of the mysteries of astrophysics. The leading theory says the particles are accelerated by tightly-twisted magnetic fields close to the black […]

Popularity: 20% [?]



Solar Flares Set the Sun Quaking

By admin • Apr 19th, 2008 • Category: Astronomy

Data from the ESA/NASA spacecraft SOHO shows clearly that powerful starquakes ripple around the Sun in the wake of mighty solar flares that explode above its surface. The observations give solar physicists new insight into a long-running solar mystery and may even provide a way of studying other stars.
The outermost quarter of the Sun’s interior […]

Popularity: 22% [?]



New Way of Estimating Size and Frequency of Meteorite Impacts

By admin • Apr 13th, 2008 • Category: Astronomy

Scientists have developed a new way of determining the size and frequency of meteorites that have collided with Earth.
Their work shows that the size of the meteorite that likely plummeted to Earth at the time of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary 65 million years ago was four to six kilometers in diameter. The meteorite was the […]

Popularity: 24% [?]



New Rocky Planet Found in Constellation Leo

By admin • Apr 10th, 2008 • Category: Astronomy

Spanish and UCL (University College London) scientists have discovered a possible terrestrial-type planet orbiting a star in the constellation of Leo. The new planet, which lies at a distance of 30 light years from the Earth, has a mass five times that of our planet but is the smallest found to date. One full day […]

Popularity: 27% [?]



Old Galaxies Stick Together in the Young Universe

By admin • Apr 5th, 2008 • Category: Astronomy

UK astronomers have developed the most sensitive infrared map of the distant universe ever produced, revealing the origins of the most massive galaxies in the cosmos.
 
Popularity: 29% [?]

Popularity: 29% [?]



NASA Scientists Identify Smallest Known Black Hole

By admin • Apr 2nd, 2008 • Category: Astronomy

Using a new technique, two NASA scientists have identified the lightest known black hole. With a mass only about 3.8 times greater than our Sun and a diameter of only 15 miles, the black hole lies very close to the minimum size predicted for black holes that originate from dying stars.
“This black hole is really […]

Popularity: 31% [?]



New Star Systems First of Their Kind

By admin • Apr 2nd, 2008 • Category: Astronomy

Researchers funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced today in Astrophysical Journal Letters that they have discovered a faraway binary star system that could be the progenitor of a rare type of supernova.
The two yellow stars, which orbit each other and even share a large amount of stellar material, resemble a peanut. The Ohio […]

Popularity: 26% [?]