Nov. 30
An ultraluminous infrared merger
The galaxy IIZw 096, 500
million light years away in the
constellation of delphinius, has
attracted the attention of researchers
because it turns out to be one of the
most luminous objects in the infrared in
the local
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Nov. 29
Not much life in the California Nebula
It's well known that stars
are born from the gravitational
contraction of gas in diffuse nebulae,
and that the more gas is available the
greater the number of stars that are
formed. At least that is what was
thought until
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Nov. 27
Here's how M31, LMC and SMC formed
A very attractive hypothesis
has emerged from a series of complex
computer simulations carried out by a
group of astronomers from the
Observatoire de Paris and the National
Astronomical Observatory of China
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Nov. 26
Massive galaxies, unusually distant
A preview has just been
released of results, soon to be
published in The Astrophysical Journal,
that reveal the existence of very
massive galaxies only 1.5-2 billion
years after the Big Bang. They are 5-10
times
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Nov. 24
The Universe was liquid
A few microseconds after the
Big Bang the Universe behaved like an
ultra dense, ultra hot liquid. This is
the surprising conclusion reached by a
team of physicists working with the
ALICE detector of the Large
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Nov. 23
New light shed on T-dwarf stars
Amongst the coolest brown
dwarfs are those of spectral class T,
that have methane rich atmospheres; in
fact they are often called "Methane
Dwarfs". Their low masses and
temperatures, typically around 1000
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Nov. 22
Ellipticals produce stars too
The idea that elliptical
galaxies are essentially a kind of
stellar museum, containing only stars
billions of years old, must surely be
abandoned by now. In fact it's been
established that about a third of all
ellipticals
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Nov. 19
Fewer stars than predicted: here's why
Calculations by Jan
Pflamm-Altenburg and Pavel Kroupa of the
Argelander-Institut für Astronomie
(University of Bonn), in collaboration
with Carsten Weidner of St. Andrews
University (Scotland) show that there
are
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Nov. 18
NGC 1514 according to WISE
Last September NASA's
Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)
began a new phase of operation, called
NEOWISE, marking the end of its supply
of liquid coolant for the longest
wavelength detectors (two shorter
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Nov. 17
White dwarfs on the verge of explosion
As a by-product of a search
for hyper-velocity stars escaping from
the Galaxy, Warren Brown and his team at
the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics, have recently discovered a
handful of binary star
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Nov. 16
Baby black hole in M 100
On 19th April 1979 the
amateur astronomer Gus E. Johnson, from
Swanton (Maryland), discovered a
supernova in the spiral galaxy M 100.
After 30 years that supernova is making
the news again because it
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Nov. 15
Barred galaxies age more quickly
Galaxy Zoo 2, the "sequel"
of Galaxy Zoo, has produced its first
scientific result, leading to an article
published recently in the Monthly
Notices of the Royal Astronomical
Society by Karen Masters and her team
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Nov. 12
Hartley: carbon dioxide jets
The first scientific results
of the recent flyby of comet 103P/Hartley
2 by the EPOXI mission are starting to
materialise. The most recent and
interesting to date is that for the
first time it has been possible to
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Nov. 11
Saturn's thermal anomalies
In research published a
couple of days ago in the Journal of
Geophysical Research-Planets, it is
shown that the two hemispheres of Saturn
show temperature variations that can
only partly be explained by
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Nov. 10
Huge Galactic structure discovered
Out of the fog of ultra-high
energy photons that pervades our galaxy,
a gigantic structure has been uncovered.
It consists of two bubbles of gamma ray
radiation, one to the north and one to
the south of
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Nov. 9
Is Eris smaller than Pluto?
This is the question raised
by the occultation of a 17th magnitude
star that happened on 6th November.
Passing infront of the star was Eris,
the dwarf planet discovered in 2005 by a
team lead by Mike Brown at Caltech.
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Nov. 8
Earth: water from the first
day
According to an important
article by Nora H. de Leeuw (University
College London) and colleagues,
published in Chemical Communications,
the water on our planet is not of
extraterrestrial origin. Until now it
was
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Nov. 6
New kind of rocks discovered on the Moon
No new types of lunar rock
had been discovered since the Seventies.
The last was a new kind of basalt
containing very little titanium, brought
back to Earth by the Apollo astronauts.
The new discovery is of
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Nov. 4
The first photos of comet 103P/Hartley 2
The Deep Impact spacecraft
has successfully executed its second
cometary flyby, this time of the
periodic comet Hartley 2. The mission,
named EPOXY, was intended to photograph
and study the nucleus at
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Nov. 4
Hanny's Voorwerp: the mystery solved
In 2007, as part of the
galaxy classification project known as
the Galaxy Zoo, the Dutch school
teacher, Hanny van Arkel, discovered an
unusual green object, that, for want of
a better identification has been
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Nov. 3
Cosmic climate change
The idea of a Universe who's
temperature decreases steadily as it
ages and expands seems inconsistent with
a recent discovery of a long period in
which the temperature actually
increased, as shown by an
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Nov. 2
The shadow of galaxy clusters on the CMB
A large group of astronomers
from the Rutgers University (New Jersey)
and at the Pontifical Catholic
University of Chile (PUC), has
discovered 10 remote galaxy clusters via
their "shadows" projected onto
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