MC²

May 19, 2010
A new infrared image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, showcases the Tadpole nebula, a star-forming hub in the Auriga constellation about 12,000 light-years from Earth. As WISE scanned the sky, capturing this mosaic of stitched-together frames, it happened to catch an asteroid in our solar system [...]

May 18, 2010
After billions of years of twinkling and shining, some stars in the heavens appear to “dance” as they wind down. Maybe not like Elvis or Michael Jackson, but they definitely have a rhythmic beat, and some may even spin like a top.
For the next two weeks, the Whole Earth Telescope, [...]

May 21, 2010
Researchers at Spain’s Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) demonstrate evidence in support of the common ancestry of life, thanks to a new computational approach to study protein evolution.
The work, published in Nature, takes its inspiration from the astronomer Edwin Hubble and uses his approach to study protein evolution. The [...]

October 7, 2009
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered an enormous ring around Saturn — by far the largest of the giant planet’s many rings.
The new belt lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system, with an orbit tilted 27 degrees from the main ring plane. The bulk of its material starts about six million [...]

October 6, 2009
Crashing a rocket into the Moon will create “one more dimple” on the lunar surface and could find water ice on Earth’s nearest neighbour, according to a Durham University expert.
Dr Vincent Eke’s research has helped inform NASA’s decision about where to crash its probes into the Moon’s surface in search of water.
The Lunar [...]

October 6, 2009
Some stars are lonely behemoths, with no surrounding planets or asteroids, while others sport a skirt of attendant planetary bodies. New research published this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters explains why the composition of the stars often indicates whether their light shines into deep space, or whether a small fraction shines onto [...]

October 6, 2009
Billions of tonnes of water droplets vanish from the atmosphere in events that reveal in detail how the Sun and the stars control our everyday clouds. Researchers of the National Space Institute in the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) have traced the consequences of eruptions on the Sun that screen the Earth from [...]

October 4, 2009
A team of University of Hawai’i at Mānoa researchers led by Ralf Kaiser, physical chemist at UH Mānoa, unraveled the chemical evolution of the orange-brownish colored atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan, the only solar system body besides Venus and Earth with a solid surface and thick atmosphere. The UH Mānoa team, including Xibin [...]

October 2, 2009
Europe’s Herschel space telescope has delivered spectacular vistas of cold gas clouds lying near the plane of the Milky Way, revealing intense, unexpected activity. The dark, cool region is dotted with stellar factories, like pearls on a cosmic string.
On Sept. 3, Herschel aimed its telescope at a reservoir of cold gas in the [...]

October 2, 2009
Quite a few distant galaxies turn out to be cosmic delivery rooms. Large numbers of massive stars are born in the hearts of these starburst galaxies, and later explode as supernovae. In the remnants they leave behind, particles are accelerated to very high energies. Astrophysicists have now used the H.E.S.S. telescopes to make [...]