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ABOUT 4.6bn years ago, a spinning disc of gas and dust began to coalesce into balls of matter. The largest sphere, at the disc’s centre, collapsed under its own gravity to form the sun. Other clumps of dust, scattered around its periphery, became planets and asteroids. In planets this dust has long since metamorphosed into rock. But in many asteroids it is still more or less intact. As a consequence, when asteroids collide, some of it is liberated—and a small fraction of that material eventually falls to Earth as micrometeorites. This micrometeoritic dust arrives at a rate of around six...

Home/News/Stony meteorites reveal the timing of Jupiter’s migration 941 Stony meteorites reveal the timing of Jupiter’s migration The gas giant caused iron-vaporizing collisions in the asteroid belt 5 million years ago. By K.N. Smith | Published: Tuesday, December 13, 2016 JUPITER_proccessed_image An artist's rendering of Jupiter WikiMedia Commons/ Ukstillalive The youngest stony meteorites in the solar system may reveal when Jupiter migrated through the asteroid belt. These meteors contain grains of metal that can only be the remnant of high-velocity collisions driven by Jupiter’s gravitational influence. New evidence comes from a rare group of meteorites called CB chondrites. Formed around...

Before they turn to cannibalism, massive galaxies spend their infancy gobbling up recycled gas from earlier generations of star formation. The Spiderweb Galaxy is actually more of a galaxy-in-progress. One day, it will be an enormous elliptical galaxy at the heart of a galactic cluster, but at the moment – technically, at a moment ten billion years away whose light is only just reaching us on Earth – it’s a group of about a dozen small proto-galaxies, slowly falling together and merging amid a vast halo of cold gas. At the center of that spiderweb of gas and merging galaxies...

Record Supermoon and 9 More Can't-Miss Sky Events in November The coming month brings the roaring lion of meteor displays, dazzling planets, and plenty more reasons to look up at the night sky. You’ll even have the chance to catch the most impressive supermoon in nearly seven decades.So dust off those binoculars and mark your November calendar!Moon and Saturn—November 2 About an hour after local sunset, catch the razor-thin crescent moon hanging over Saturn. The cosmic pair will appear less than three degrees apart, or less than the width of your three middle fingers held at arm’s length. Adding to...

In 1963, an astronomy student named Gail Smith working at an observatory in the Netherlands discovered something odd-a massive cloud of gas orbiting the Milky Way galaxy. Smith's cloud contained enough gas to make 2 million stars the size of our sun, and it was moving through space at 700,000 mph. For the next 40+ years the cloud remained a curiosity, one of a growing number of so-called high velocity clouds circling the Milky Way--interesting but not sensational. Then something changed. In the mid-2000s, radio astronomer Jay Lockman and colleagues took a closer look at Smith's Cloud using the Green...

Nasa is expected to make an announcement about 'surprising activity' on Jupiter's moon, Europa, on Monday. Many speculated that Nasa could finally be announcing evidence of life beyond Earth. The space agency, however, has poured cold water over these claims, tweeting that the much anticipated announcement will not be related to aliens.

Explanation: Follow the handle of the Big Dipper away from the dipper's bowl, until you get to the handle's last bright star. Then, just slide your telescope a little south and west and you might find this stunning pair of interacting galaxies, the 51st entry in Charles Messier's famous catalog. Perhaps the original spiral nebula, the large galaxy with well defined spiral structure is also cataloged as NGC 5194. Its spiral arms and dust lanes clearly sweep in front of its companion galaxy (left), NGC 5195. The pair are about 31 million light-years distant and officially lie within the angular...

In her 1968 poem, “Planetarium,” the poet Adrienne Rich wrestles with the crisis of female identity through the lens of astronomy. Rich wrote the poem after learning about the case of Caroline Herschel, a 19th-century, German-born astronomer who discovered eight comets and three nebulae, and drew praise from the King of Prussia and London’s Royal Astronomical Society. Yet Caroline remained obscure compared with her brother, William, who discovered the planet Uranus.

Remember Tabby’s Star? It’s the star that astronomer Tabetha Boyajian – who reported its strangeness in a Ted Talk in February, 2016 – famously called “the most mysterious star in the galaxy.” It’s mysterious because astronomers have never seen another star do what this star does. One explanation for the strange dimming of its light is that the star has an alien-built megastructure – a Dyson sphere – around it. Does it? Will we ever know for sure? Those are unanswered questions, but, while you’re pondering it, here’s the latest on this wonderful star. On August 3, 2016, two astronomers...

2K 6 Forbidden planets: Understanding alien worlds once thought impossible By Daniel CleryJul. 28, 2016 , 2:00 PM When astronomers discovered the first exoplanet around a normal star 2 decades ago, there was joy—and bewilderment. The planet, 51 Pegasi b, was half as massive as Jupiter, but its 4-day orbit was impossibly close to the star, far smaller than the 88-day orbit of Mercury. Theorists who study planet formation could see no way for a planet that big to grow in such tight confines around a newborn star. It could have been a freak, but soon, more “hot Jupiters” turned...

Quasar Found 420 Trillion Times Brighter Than Our SunAn international team of astronomers have discovered a huge quasar 420 trillion times brighter than our sun around 12.8 billion light years away from Earth, placing its formation around 875 million years after the big bang. The ancient object is powered by a massive black hole and contains a staggering 12 billion solar masses, surprising scientists who had not expected such a huge bright quasar so close to the dawn of time. The quasar was found using telescopes located in China, Hawaii, Arizona, and Chile, and as Xue-Bing Wu, of Peking...

The incident caused speculation online - and is not the first time NASA have been accused of tampering with the feed. Trending Theresa May Pokemon GO Dallas police shooting Weather Angela Eagle Alton Sterling Technology Money Travel Fashion Mums Home News Weird News UFOs NASA shuts down live International Space Station feed as 'mysterious UFO enters Earth's atmosphere' 22:16, 12 Jul 2016 Updated 13:17, 13 Jul 2016 By Elle Griffiths The incident caused speculation online - and is not the first time NASA have been accused of tampering with the feed 2602 shares 227 comments Play 1:31 / 1:31 Fullscreen...

Explanation: Bright noctilucent or night shining clouds are not familiar sights from northern France. But these electric-blue waves coursed through skies over the small town of Wancourt in Pas-de-Calais on July 6, just before the dawn. From the edge of space, about 80 kilometers above Earth's surface, the icy clouds still reflect sunlight even though the Sun itself is below the horizon as seen from the ground. Usually spotted at high latitudes in summer months the diaphanous apparitions are also known as polar mesospheric clouds. The seasonal clouds are understood to form as water vapor driven into the cold upper...

Explanation: At the core of the Crab Nebula lies a city-sized, magnetized neutron star spinning 30 times a second. Known as the Crab Pulsar, it's actually the rightmost of two bright stars, just below a central swirl in this stunning Hubble snapshot of the nebula's core. Some three light-years across, the spectacular picture frames the glowing gas, cavities and swirling filaments bathed in an eerie blue light. The blue glow is visible radiation given off by electrons spiraling in a strong magnetic field at nearly the speed of light. Like a cosmic dynamo the pulsar powers the emission from the...

Explanation: The Milky Way is massively bright on this cold, clear, altiplano night. At 4,500 meters its reflection in a river, a volcanic peak on the distant horizon, is captured in this stitched panorama under naturally dark skies of the northern Chilean highlands near San Pedro de Atacama. Along the Solar System's ecliptic plane, the band of Zodiacal light also stands out, extending above the Milky Way toward the upper left. In the scene from late April, brilliant Mars, Saturn, and Antares form a bright celestial triangle where ecliptic meets the center of the Milky Way. Left of the triangle,...

Explanation: A remarkable telescopic composition in yellow and blue, this scene features a trio of interacting galaxies almost 90 million light-years away, toward the constellation Virgo. On the right, two, spiky, foreground Milky Way stars echo the trio galaxy hues, a reminder that stars in our own galaxy are like those in the distant island universes. With sweeping spiral arms and obscuring dust lanes, NGC 5566 is enormous, about 150,000 light-years across. Just above it lies small, blue NGC 5569. Near center, the third galaxy, NGC 5560, is multicolored and apparently stretched and distorted by its interaction with NGC 5566....

Explanation: The many spectacular colors of the Rho Ophiuchi (oh'-fee-yu-kee) clouds highlight the many processes that occur there. The blue regions shine primarily by reflected light. Blue light from the star Rho Ophiuchi and nearby stars reflects more efficiently off this portion of the nebula than red light. The Earth's daytime sky appears blue for the same reason. The red and yellow regions shine primarily because of emission from the nebula's atomic and molecular gas. Light from nearby blue stars - more energetic than the bright star Antares - knocks electrons away from the gas, which then shines when the...

Explanation: South of Antares, in the tail of the nebula-rich constellation Scorpius, lies emission nebula IC 4628. Nearby hot, massive stars, millions of years young, radiate the nebula with invisible ultraviolet light, stripping electrons from atoms. The electrons eventually recombine with the atoms to produce the visible nebular glow, dominated by the red emission of hydrogen. At an estimated distance of 6,000 light-years, the region shown is about 250 light-years across, spanning an area equivalent to four full moons on the sky. The nebula is also cataloged as Gum 56 for Australian astronomer Colin Stanley Gum, but seafood-loving astronomers might...

Having a great July 4th? The day gives us another cause to celebrate, as the Earth reaches aphelion today, or our farthest point to our host star. Aphelion is the opposite of the closest point of the year, known as perihelion. Note that the ‘helion’ part only applies to things in solar orbit, perigee/apogee for orbit ’round the Earth, apolune/perilune for orbit around the Moon, and so on. You’ll hear the words apijove and perijove bandied about this week a bit, as NASA’s Juno spacecraft enters orbit around Jupiter tonight. And there are crazier and even more obscure counterparts out...

Explanation: Three thousand light-years away, a dying star throws off shells of glowing gas. This image from the Hubble Space Telescope reveals the Cat's Eye Nebula to be one of the most complex planetary nebulae known. In fact, the features seen in the Cat's Eye are so complex that astronomers suspect the bright central object may actually be a binary star system. The term planetary nebula, used to describe this general class of objects, is misleading. Although these objects may appear round and planet-like in small telescopes, high resolution images reveal them to be stars surrounded by cocoons of gas...