AstroNews - Page 5

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The Associate Press has released a video from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory of a flare erupting from the Sun. Solar Flares are sudden brightening of the Sun’s surface. They occur when the strong magnetic field of the Sun (in a yet poorly understood mechanism) accelerates charged particles to near the speed of light.

A new dwarf planet has recently been discovered in the solar system, orbiting at about 10 light hours from our Star. This is the furthest object belonging to our planetary system that we have been able to observe.

It was announced on Monday that the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarisation 2 (BICEP2 – don’t you love projects acronyms?) experiment at the South Pole found a special pattern in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The pattern they found is the B-mode polarisation signal in the CMB.  Waves that can oscillate in more than one orientation […]

NASA has announced that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped some interesting photos that seem to indicate that water still flows on the surface of the red planet during the summer months. No water was directly detected but the presence of those long dark lines stretching from the slope suggest the a wet process is taking place. […]

From the NASA website: Astronomers have used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and a suite of other telescopes to reveal one of the most powerful black holes known. The black hole has created enormous structures in the hot gas surrounding it and prevented trillions of stars from forming.

An amateur Russian astronomer has observed a Supernova in M82, a galaxy that is only 12 million light years away (a walk to the chemist on cosmic scales). The supernova has been confirmed as a Type Ia supernova. These supernovae occur when a white dwarf in a binary system accretes enough mass from the companion […]